The Explosion (Short Story)

Written 11-16-2013,  Updated 4-2-2017

The experiment was actually very popular before the catastrophe. Almost everyone forgets that, but it's true. I guess that's understandable. Ninety percent of the general public was in favor of the experiment. The experiment went horribly awry. One hundred percent of the general public was worse off for it. Why would they want to remember that most of them kind of asked for it?

The educated might remember a thing like that, if it meant they could hold it over everybody's head. Of course, in this case, educated people were as enthused about the experiment as anyone else. I was, too. You'd have to use a very narrow definition of educated to say otherwise. You would have to define “educated” as those who were educated in the field, and were privy to details of the experiment, but were not involve in it. The majority of those people were indeed opposed to the experiment. They made noise, too. They were just drowned out by a general public consisting of almost everyone else.

It's strange that I'm pondering the definition of an educated person at a time like this. I'm about to do the single most dangerous thing I've done since the immediate post-explosion period. At that time, the act of living was extraordinarily dangerous, anywhere and all the times. There's a reason so few of us are alive today. But now, I'm going to do something almost equally dangerous. I'm going out of town.

You see, it isn't safe to travel anymore. It hasn't been, ever since the explosion that was the downfall of society. I always figured that the downfall of human society would come soon and would probably be be man-made. I expected it to be something small, something everyone overlooked–water pollution was my odds-on favorite. If it was not to be our fault, I thought a particularly hardy fungus might suddenly develop a taste for staple grains and end up out-competing us for our own crops.

I did not expect it to be anything with a conspicuous place in the popular imagination. If you had told me beforehand that civilization would end in an explosion, I would have said it was a little on the nose, that most of the nuclear powers had come around to politically reasonable rule, but that nuclear weapons were never not dangerous, and if two or three elections went really wrong, well, fewer people than ever were talking about nuclear weapons, and I suppose it could happen.

It wasn't a nuclear explosion that changed the world forever, though. It was a population explosion. A population explosion of dinosaurs. Everyone was talking about the dinosaurs. I could not have been more wrong.

Still, if anyone had expected dinosaurs to end the world, I don't think they would have. Even the pessimists, the genetic engineers who opposed the experiment, thought that any disastrous end to the project would be a contained disaster. There was a reason Paleo Playground was built on Antarctica. It was thought that genetic sterilization of the really dangerous beasts, and a remote location where the animals could not survive outside a climate-controlled park zone, would keep the risks confined to a minimal area. Opposition to the project was based on the fact that if enough went wrong, scientists and visitors were likely to die. Some thought that to take this risk for what would largely be a for-profit commercial venture was unprincipled. Nobody thought that it was a global risk.

There were a couple of outside factors that changed the equation. The first of these was the hole in the ozone layer. Not too long before the beginnings of the experiment, the hole in the ozone layer actually began to shrink. It was heralded as a small victory in a much larger conservationist movement. It was also the reason that ultraviolet radiation in Antarctica was not immediately raised as a concern.

Then the transition in from developing to developed came on for real in China and India, and it blew the recovering environment wide open. I do not mean to blame the Chinese and Indian people. They were only doing what the rest of the world had taught them that they should want to do. If there is blame to be assigned, I blame the culture of the developed world. If there is no blame, then there is no blame. Regardless, the Ozone's tenuous progress was reversed in a heartbeat. After that, things really took a turn for the worse. At its first peak, the hole would not have endangered Paleo Playground. At its second peak, the whole continent was just overrun. The scientists had left the genomes of docile prey animals intact, because feeding the major attractions would have been astronomically expensive if reproduction had to be engineered, instead of just proceeding via natural means. Truly dangerous dinosaurs were genetically sterilized. This measure was thought to be a strong safeguard. The sudden increase in UV light introduced the possibility that the precaution could be reversed. Possibility, as we know, is the first step to Murphy's Law at work.

Murphy really outdid himself with this one, though. Imagine a population of intact Tyrannosaurus Rex. They would certainly be very large. Their dietary requirements would be ghastly. In a way, though, this would work against the Tyrannosaurs and for the human race. I don't know that Tyrannosaurus would even take much interest in a human being as food. We're just too small to be worth the trouble to a creature that size. Perhaps if he ran across a dead person, or a very oblivious person who did not get out of the way, he would seize the opportunity. More often, though, people would run away. A fast person is faster than a Tyrannosaurs. A slow person would have a very decent chance of outrunning Tyrannosaurus, given the motivation of a Tyrannosaurus behind him. A small morsel like one of us is much scanter motivation to the Tyrannosaurus. Sure, a sizable population of Tyrannosaurs loose in the world would wreak havoc on buildings an infrastructure, but the people would mostly survive. The Tyrannosaurs, meanwhile, would run through any prey of their own size quite quickly. After that, they would begin to starve.

I think humanity could have waited out Tyrannosaurus Rex. It was our misfortune, then, that it was Utahraptor that got loose, instead.

According to the signage in the park, it was Velociraptor that got loose. This was a lie for the sake of marketing. Velociraptor was an incredibly popular dinosaur, at least in name. Utahraptor was less recognizable. Velociraptor as an animal was not deemed impressive enough to attract an audience, though. The public perception of Velociraptor was an unstoppable killing machine. It was calculated that to reveal it as a kid-sized killing machine would be a disappointment. So, the park created a population of Utahraptor, and put Velociraptor on the sign.

Velociraptor would have changed the world, too. I have little doubt of that. There would have been plenty of prey the right size for him. He would have thrived in the world. As he did so, I think, every child in the world would have been homeschooled until every last Velociraptor was hunted down and killed. No mother is going to send a child into an outdoors overrun by child-size killing machines.

An adult, though, would be pretty safe in an encounter with a single Velociraptor. A whole pack of them would be a different matter, but a whole pack of Velociraptors would likely focus on an animal big enough to feed them all. A person wouldn't qualify.

If Velociraptor is what you get when a cat gets to live out his dreams as a dinosaur, Utahraptor is what you get when a grizzly bear is also a tiger and a rhinoceros at the same time, and all of them get to live out their dreams as a single dinosaur. A man stands no change against Utahraptor without having some serious killing machines of his own at his disposal. People stand no chance of outrunning them, either. So it was troubling when we learned that Utahraptor (still being called Velociraptor, as the charade continued) was suddenly capable of reproducing. It was alarming when we learned that Utahraptor can swim. I'm sure they were cold and miserable swimming in the Antarctic, but nevertheless they washed up on other shores, often alive. The journey had a way of making the living ones very hungry, too.

Utahraptor pretty quickly did what logging had started in the tropical jungles. It came pretty close to cleansing them of all vertebrate life, and in a hurry. They might have been confined there, where the weather is right and the concentration of O₂ is higher.

The second outside factor was global warming. If Utahraptor had remained forever confined to the jungles, global warming would have done only the harm that was there to be done by expanding the jungles. With literally billions of people abandoning first the tropical, and then the subtropical areas, though, the world's forests regained much of their former territory. Now, most of the world has enough oxygen to support all but the largest of dinosaurs. There is no longer a supply of people to support the same populations of them, but other things will take our place in an ecosystem where we were merely plant-eating prey animals anyway.

Seeing these developments, most of those who did not die fled. Some exceptionally enterprising idiots attempted to remain behind and instead adapt by keeping dinosaurs, and using them in place of technology. This was every bit as insane as it sounds, and more. It turns out that life is not an episode of The Flintstones, and dinosaurs are not suitable replacements for public transportation and mining equipment and garbage disposals. The only function dinosaurs serve in human society is cause of death. We are tiny little meat snacks to them. They are death to us. The only thing keeping them close to human society does is to invite a death that comes more quickly.

Whether through death or abandonment, so many once-inhabited areas have been reclaimed by nature, by the oxygen-producing vegetation. I find that I miss a good old-fashioned clear-cut and the poorly-restrained logging industry such things once came to symbolize. Perhaps at some point, the vegetation will consume enough greenhouse gasses to reduce some of the warming and push the dinosaurs back into their old tropical range. I have little hope that I will live to see that day. And of course, I will not live in a place where I might see it happen.

Global warming and the runaway melting of the icecaps have made Antarctica more livable, which was both a fortune and a misfortune to myself and the huge numbers of displaced people suddenly moving in. We were more comfortable–and so were other things. Global warming has, I suppose inevitably, allowed more things to escape the confines of Paleo Playground.

The higher areas are still safe. It's not that dinosaurs can't climb. Some of them can. None of them are really built to do it comfortably, though. Plus, the air thins, and in forestless Antarctica, the available oxygen becomes marginal for megafauna at reasonably low elevations. It is rumored that there are mountains in subarctic and even temperate areas that are still relatively safe.

Communication with them is thoroughly impractical, though. Advancing the study of paleontology was not really a consideration in the creation of Paleo Playground, but one of the things we ended up learning anyway is that there are some dinosaurs that can detect electrical fields. Any sort of transmitting device tends to attract them. Things like phone lines and cell towers are basically bait. Making a phone call would be foolhardy if it brought a deadly animal into camp. The main practical problem, though, is that a phone call would have to pass through miles of uninhabited territory, where confused dinosaurs will simply destroy towers and lines on accident or out of frustration. This ends the call just as effectively.

In today's world, if you want to get data to someone, you put it on some solid state memory, and hand it to the person. If you want to archive data for the distant future, you seal up the memory real well and then bury it. We are fortunate enough to have some real hardy solid-state memory now. Vibrations and impacts to the ground above are not a problem, which is a nice problem not to have in a world full of animals that impact the ground and create a lot of vibrations.

Having a job is thoroughly impractical, too. It's more like we have lists of competencies, now. For example, I am good with gadgets. This means I am the driver, and a mechanic, and also an assistant to the head cook. This, combined with the fact that I am good at telling stories, also means that I am the storyteller.

It's a good thing I'm good with gadgets. I might be good at making the true stories interesting, and at inventing the fictional ones, but I can't remember the details very well at all. I need working electronic memory, and I can keep it working.

This is also why I am leaving. We would not organize a party for so frivolous a reason as to tell stories, but to trade. We do not grow quite enough food to survive here. It is simply too cold and too dry. We do make nuts and bolts, and they don't rust up here. Things rust out more quickly nearer to the coast, where food actually grows with reasonably little effort, when the tools aren't broken and useless. Whether it were that or any other reason, though, I need to make sure the truck keeps running. If the stoves quit working back home, people will just cook with fire for a couple days. A breakdown on the way through the low areas would be certain death if unrepaired. And since I am going anyway...