WHERE YOU ARE
TIMELINE
II
INTERFERENCE POINT
370,000,000 BCE
TETHER
aquatic
42°49’20.7”S
147°16’11.6”E
TIMELINE
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You are here.
Think of this like a guided meditation. Take a grounding breath. Only the breath you take tastes of something – many things – oil? Iodine? Zinc? Treats? And it is not air you’re breathing. And you are not on the ground. You are suspended in oily nothingness that smells of… treats. All of those other things yes but also treats.
Oh, wow. You are really hungry. Your body is all muscle and power and it is desperate ravenous predatory. You’d expect paws and claws to go with this whole mindset but it’s fins that flick in your peripherals when you try to wave your arms around. Fins and scales. You begin to spin in the water – because it’s definitely water, right, what else could it be – until you feel some organ inside you engage and you stop and the term ‘swim bladder’ appears in your mind and you feel a little queasy.
Take stock. You’re no longer constrained by gravity. You sense a bright membrane above you and silt below. You cannot blink. Your mouth is full of needles. You are hungry and – okay here’s a new one – you are horny like you’ve never been before.
You guess you are in some distant branch of the multiverse in which very old ancestors of yours not only stayed in the water but exerted chilly dominion over it. The amount of teeth in your mouth, and the cold regal ferocity you find yourself feeling, suggests this truth to you. The river is high, higher than you’d ever see it in your own branch of worlds. It’s an aquatic savannah and you’re a really ugly scaly lion.
Something small caught in the current drifts past you and you eat it without thinking. Treats. Treats of the culinary kind and treats of the carnal. There are others around you, others like you. You are in a press of bodies moving together. You can sense them around you but you can see nothing. The way you are all moving together reminds you of something. Except it’s not what it reminds you of, it’s what it is: a school of fish.
There is something of a sense of occasion. You are feeling your horniness as a phenomenal sense of pressure. The others like you are still cloaked in the murky water but you can sense them with yet another new organ somewhere in your body, something crackling and finely tuned, something someone else would call magnetic electric transmitting something like that.
Ah who cares. Treats. Those others appear as sparks through the gloom. One or all of them will be a treat for you.
The body you’re in is massive and weightless, floating power, strength and potential. Another breath tastes of selenium. Mercury. Mud. Blood. Those others through the murk are fighting with each other and spurting blood and other matter. They’re doing it for you. You think, Oh wow. That’s hot.
Without ceremony you feel the horny pressure build up and let go and a jet of eggs spurts from you, from somewhere. They are the size of marbles and the colour of ozone. You eat one without thinking. Through the murk one of the others detaches himself from the fight and comes up crackling magnetic to you and your egg cloud. His eyes are enormous flat reflective disks. His teeth are yellow bristles. He’s revolting. He’s irresistible. He’s releasing clouds of acrid sperm. Hello gorgeous, he says.
Wow, you think. Wow. They’re the same in every universe. Even the one where we evolved into horny fish people.
Take a deep grounding breath. Say goodbye to the treats and the heavy metal filled water and the fight and the power and the eggs. The one you’re looking for isn’t here and you shouldn’t be either.