and that memory was very good. He/she/I remembered a time when there were others like us — great, gentle beasts roaming the seas, well before humans appeared on the scene. It was a time of peace and harmony, which sounds dull when I say it out loud but it was good back then, quite good. And I’m pretty sure we were telepathic. In the dream, it really was like being there.
When I woke up, I was surprised to discover I was still in my bed. I was slightly shocked to see I had two arms and two legs and that I had been returned to 2014. I looked in the mirror and saw that my hair was continuing to grow back on my head but stubble was also starting to appear on my chin. Pretty soon I would actually need to shave. I saw a look in my eyes that said I was disappointed with what I was seeing. But then I remembered Robyn and I cheered up. I remembered that I had promised to go to Tibet with her someday and that cheered me up even more.
It was a Saturday and that meant no school but I had no real plans. I wrote down my dream on my comp — about being the Loch Ness monster. (Now I was convinced I had somehow merged my identity while asleep with the great beast.) I half convinced myself that I had travelled back in time with/as the LNM. Maybe I would not need the hundred-megaton nuke to power my time travel after all.
Sitting before my home comp, I fed in a profile of the LNM and asked the searcher how long ago it would have been that such creatures roamed freely. Sixty-five million years ago was the answer.
“Why did they disappear?” I asked the searcher.
The sweet, feminine voice (the one I had programmed) came back immediately to say, “Probably a meteorite, Dylan. An extremely massive chunk of rock from space. First the collision, next the crater, and then a huge column of debris catapulted into the atmosphere and then drifted all over the earth, cutting off the sun. It meant the extinction of many earth creatures.” She sounded so sad and sweet when she said this, and I felt a pang of regret too when she sobbed. I knew it was only programmed emotion (the upgrade I had installed last month, the one my father found foolish), but my own sadness was real.
“Dinosaurs and other creatures, like your friend the Loch Ness monster, had been around for 100 million years. It was their planet.”
“They didn’t know what hit them,” I said. “And then they were gone. All of them gone. All but one.”
“It has not been absolutely proven that the creature exists,” she countered.
“I know,” I said. “But it hasn’t been proven that it doesn’t exist, right?” I asked.
“Correct.”
“But sixty-five million years is a long time. Nothing could live that long.”
“No single organism. But life regenerates.”
“Remind me how long humans have been around.”
“Less than four million years.”
“That’s not very long, is it?”
“Depends on your point of reference.”
“Compared to dinosaurs.”
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