Dinosaurs on My Mind

Fiction: Dinosaurs, playful cats, enlightenment, the future (Topic: Dinosaurs)

Feb 23, 2023

This story was written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. This cycle, the theme was “dinosaurs.”

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Fear floods through my soul as I open my eyes. Cowering behind a cold, sterile, stainless steel examination table, my heart pounds. MOVE! NOW! RUN! My brain screams. But my body refuses to obey, trapped by instinct to remain still. Taking a deep breath, I try to stop my hands from trembling as I peer around the corner of the table.

Tap, Tap, Tap.

In the darkened room, I can just make out the carnivorous beasts. The velociraptors pace restlessly back and forth across the lab. They are hunting, searching for prey. Every movement is a coiled threat, every hiss promises death and fills the air with danger.

With their razor-sharp claws and their deadly intelligence, these creatures are the stuff of nightmares. And yet, here they are, right in front of me, their sleek bodies twisting and turning with a grace that belies the violence they're capable of. The violence they are going to inflict upon me.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

One of the deadly reptiles pauses, and I can now see its middle claw, tapping the floor, sending a morse code (tap, tap, tap) warning to all prey that this apex predator spells their doom. There is no hope! The horror’s piercing eyes fix on the edge of the table where I hide, and I realize: it knows I’m here! It can smell my fear but I can’t stop my body’s reaction. I feel my pulse quickening, my breath now coming in short, panicked gasps. And I know that at any moment, one of these lethal beasts will launch itself at me, rending flesh from bone with ease.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I am suddenly and acutely aware of how fragile and insignificant I am in comparison to these ancient predators.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The lead raptor lunges toward me, its maw opening with an ear splitting roar!

My eyes fly open. My bedroom is dimly lit by the amber light of the bedside lamp.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I freeze and my wife and I communicate with each other with our eyes, an unspoken plea: don’t move.

The cat wants to play.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Bella’s tapping the bench at the foot of our bed, so I pretend to be asleep.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

An almost imperceptible whine.

Sigh. It’s no use, she knows I’m awake.

I sit up and walk into the kitchen as Bella chases me, energetically slapping the back of my legs, like a puppy, to let me know that she’s ready to play. I pour myself a glass of water, and head back to the bedroom toward the designated (by her) “play area.”

Bella rockets through the living room, leaping a third of the way across the room, hits a column about four feet off the ground, and “ricochets” into the bedroom. She’s discovered that she can make the turn faster by utilizing the “ricochet method”, rather than sliding across the tile floor during a quick turn. I grab her favorite toy and sit cross-legged on the floor at the foot of the bed.

However, as I wave the toy in front of her face, I can tell from her wild golden eyes that she isn’t interested in the toy. She doesn’t want to play with a toy. Like the velociraptor in my Jurrasic Park inspired nightmare, she wants to play with me. As a kitten, she decided that I’m one of her litter-mates and she treats me as her brother. Her ears go back, and before I can stop her, she flies through the air and pounces upon my arm, so I push her away and wrestle her to the ground in an attempt to “scold” her. She’s purring loudly now because “wrestling” with her “buddy” (me) is exactly what she wanted. Sigh. This was cute when she was a tiny kitten (and truth be told it’s cute now). But I’ve trained her badly. Oh well. Let’s play!

I give in and declare that it’s “It’s WWE time, Bella!” And I pin her down. One! Two! Three! I smack the ground with my hand. “I win this round!” She squeals in delight while purring from her open mouth. I let her up and she, again, “attacks.” And, we go back and forth until I have her running at full speed after a laser pointer until she finally stops, panting.

Chuckling, and now awake, I head over to my computer to work on my latest piece about Dinosaurs for the Soaring Twenties Social Club….

I slip on my reading glasses to proofread what I’ve got so far….

The small mammal, (an ancestor of Ectoconus, who, in turn, is an ancestor of Homo Sapiens) darted through the underbrush, attempting to avoid the large land leviathans that later humans would call “dinosaurs.” His small brain searched for a route that avoided danger and toward possible food. The small creature was afraid. He didn’t understand why, but the sky had an extra “moon” that was getting larger, and was visible during the dark time, and he had an unshakable sense of impending doom.

Suddenly, he felt a strange pull from ahead, something compelled him to step out from the underbrush. He looked both ways and saw no visible danger. Up ahead, however, loomed a dark,strange object. Not an animal. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. He approached, slowly, warily, and could hear a faint humming coming from the jet black monolith. The ectoconus tentatively reached up his tiny paw and touched the monolith and was instantly overwhelmed with sensations. Images. Knowledge. Feelings. Abstract thinking. Fear. He understood everything. The small mammal jerked his paw away. Confusion flooded back into him. He felt different, somehow, but had lost the crystal clarity he had while touching the dark thing.

But he knew one thing for certain. One message stayed in his mind: Danger approached from the sky. The monolith had planted that one important idea: Hide underground. The huge light in the sky was approaching and, bringing with it, death. Hide.

So, as the famous meteor streaked through the earth’s atmosphere toward its fateful impact near the Yucatan peninsula, the tiny ancient ancestor of human beings scurried into a deep burrow and survived the extinction event. The dinosaurs however, did not……

I stop and reflect.

Hmm. Maybe the monolith from 2001, A Space Odyssey is too iconic? Perhaps. But I don’t have a lot of space to get the ideas across in such a short story, so maybe leaning on the trope is worth it in this case? Or maybe I could change history? What if a dinosaur touched the monolith instead? I briefly imagine how that would have changed the history of the world…

Inspiration has now struck, and weird ideas start flowing. Creativity often hits like that: while listening to music, while playing with your cat, or while running. Since taking up mediation, I often ponder about our mind’s thoughts. We humans create, in our own minds, our own leviathanic nightmares, especially in the form of fears, anxieties and worries. These “dinosaurs of the mind” lumber through our mental landscape roaring, killing, and obscuring our full potential, while our little mammalian friend, the potential of enlightenment hides in the corner, cowering from fear.

“God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.” - Ishmael, from Moby Dick

It dawns on me, given our propensity to live in fear of fictional monsters of our minds, that we would all be lucky to meet our metaphorical “meteor.” Abolish it all. The death of everything. Darkness. The Void. The end of suffering. And then perhaps our little mammal of enlightenment, can meet the monolith again and we could touch the stars.

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

And I’m not speaking of Einstein. Or Newton. Or our Forefathers.

I’m speaking of the dinosaurs.

Fossil fuels.

They died so that we may live. And, following the 2nd law of thermodynamics, they degraded into increasing chaos, energy unavailable to do useful work. But time and pressure reformed them into something different: Drops of oil.

To our ancestors, oil was useless, unavailable to do work. But that spark of enlightenment, that little mammal in our minds, has enabled human beings to accomplish great things. We built technology and we discerned that there was great power in drops of oil. And we built machines and great civilizations on top of black gold.

Dead dinosaurs enabled the industrial age and changed the world. And the industrial age enabled the information age.

But both ages should really be called “the fossil fuel age.”

How about, “The dead dinosaur bodies age?”

Those land leviathans of yesteryear perished in a sacrifice, giving their bodies to that which powers the very device I type these words into, and the network I will transmit these words through. And indeed, dead dinosaur bodies power nearly everything in the modern world: food production, transportation, warmth, electricity, shipping.

And let’s not forget plastics! Fossil fuels are used to make the plastics in our computers, our iPhones, our packaging, our vehicles, and even our sex toys (think about that dead dinosaur you’re holding next time you’re enjoying foreplay with a plastic toy)!

They, those reptiles of antiquity, power nearly everything that allows us to live the lives of civilized men and women. Without dead dinosaurs, most of us would die too. Some people in this world want us to stop burning dead dinosaurs. They prefer to just leave them buried in their graves, undisturbed, instead of cremating them and spewing what’s left into the atmosphere. And that is a good idea for the day when alternatives can generate greater energy output than oil (and we should be throwing lots of resources into these ideas). But some of those people seem to be OK with humans dying en masse as simply the price we have to pay to prematurely stop standing on the shoulders of these giants. But that’s an article for another day.

From the point of view of our forefathers, oil was entropy: useless chaos. But now, with our increased knowledge and understanding, that very oil powers the entire world. What more could we accomplish if we allow our mental dinosaurs to sacrifice themselves for our small mammal of creativity and progress?

What other entropies do we currently not understand because we are still computationally bounded? How do we, like that small mammal escape our current mental limits?

I don’t know the answer to those questions. But I do know that we, humanity, have much more to Create, and we must unleash the mammal, achieve enlightenment, we must ascend, for instead of the second law leading to the heat death of the universe, maybe in our enlightened state, not only can we avoid destroying one another, and this very earth, but perhaps the future descendants of that mammal that touched the monolith will discover how to harness chaos itself, the cosmic oil of the universe to evolve into something utterly unimaginable and beautiful.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I leave you here, with that thought, for my cat is calling me to play again. And, as previously illustrated, cats and velociraptors wait for no man.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I gasp, opening my eyes.

Oh! No! I’m back in the sterile laboratory.

Across the room, the velociraptor continues to stalk back and forth. This time, however, I notice something that I missed before. Against the far wall, the black monolith stands, a silent sentinel across millenia. The velociraptor stands in front of it, head cocked, questioning, curious. The monster reaches up slowly and tentatively, and, with one claw, touches the monolith…

His eyes widen and he turns around, and looks directly at me with knowing in his eyes. With vengeance in his eyes, as if to say, you evolved your technology on the backs of our bodies, and now, we will evolve our bodies on the backs of your technology.

Then he roars, again filling the room with fear. He lunges. He opens his maw.

I scream and try to wake up.

But it’s no use, he’s reached me. I can smell his rotten meat breath as his open mouth approaches my face.

And then….

Nothing. Darkness. The Void. The End of Suffering.