3: Incoming
Previously on 2.17 Seconds into Never, Liz Flask had sought the assistance of the Wombat, the Green Moth, Gaseous Girl, and Ron Raven to locate her friend Meg, lost somewhere in Time. Meanwhile….
Back In the Past
Meg Atomic had seen Jurassic Park, once or twice, and a few of the sequels; she wasn’t keen on it. She now realized that these movies hadn’t conveyed the half of what a real live Tyrannosaurus Rex was like, particularly when it was charging at you.
Picture a school bus. Stand it up on its end, add two extremely massive legs at one end, and about fifty teeth at the other, each one a foot long. Now, imagine that same bus is hurtling straight towards you like an out-of-control freight train, only the bus has a mind of its own and it’s real mad. That would be close to what Meg faced at that moment as the king of the tyrant lizards thundered towards her.
It didn’t take her long to work the probabilities, since she only had three: run, fight, or die. Run: I could make it into the trees, but I’m already exhausted from going through that all day. Wouldn’t get far. Rapidly running out of time. It’ll get me before I reach anywhere safe anyway. Fight, I could kill it, but what if that changes time? Step on the butterfly, ripple effect, world changes, I’m never born, etc.? One choice left. Die. That’s no good. Okay, so can’t run. Don’t want to die. Well, here goes nothing.
The Tyrannosaurus was nearly on her, mighty jaws opening wide. Meg wound up and hit the monster with everything she had. A second sun flared in the Late Cretaceous morning. When the dust cleared, all that remained was a parking-lot sized crater where the dinosaur had once been, with Meg teetering on the edge of it.
“Well,” she said to the drifting ash around her, “That was fun. I think I’d like to lie down now. Take a rest. Set an alarm for the 21st century, someone?” Then, assuming that any other predators would know to mind their own business after that, she collapsed down on the dirt and drifted rapidly off to sleep.
As she did she noticed a particularly bright star in the sky. “Hm,” she thought, awash in the muzziness that comes when one is thoroughly worn out. “That’s odd. You don’t usually see stars during the daytime…”
All at once several phrases tumbled together like the locks of a vault door opening in her mind. Tyrannosaurus. Dinosaurs. Cretaceous. Star in the sky.
That’s not a star.
Meg leapt to her feet, eyes wide. She didn’t know where on the planet she was, maybe still where Edison City would be millennia later, maybe somewhere else, but it didn’t matter. She knew nowhere was safe. Everyone larger than a tree shrew was in for a horrifically bad day, and Meg Atomic was definitely larger than a tree shrew.
She had the same options she had before, but they looked worse now. Nowhere to run. She still didn’t want to die. That left fighting, but how could she fight an asteroid? Not just any asteroid, the asteroid! If she remembered her Magic School Bus episodes correctly, the thing was the size of a mountain! Or Texas: no, that was Armageddon. This was a mountain, and it was heading for her, that little star in the sky growing ever larger with each passing moment.
Could she deflect it? Shatter it maybe? If she did, did that mean changing all of human history? Would mankind even exist? Would she?
Once again the vortices of Time opened before her, and she remembered what she had done before, and almost without thinking she launched the graviton pulse wave, and again Gravity and Time collided, and just as the oncoming asteroid broke into the atmosphere like a block of concrete dropped into a water puddle, Meg Atomic vanished.
Present Day
“What do you mean, we don’t?” Liz had just shot back at the Wombat. “We can, right? You, Butterfly, Moth, whatever, can you get us back to wherever Meg is?”
The Green Moth drew herself up icily. “As I tried to explain before, once a new branch of time is made, it cannot be unmade, which means-”
“Right, right, you can’t go back and undo it, I know, but that’s not what I asked,” Liz demanded. “Can we go back?”
“We would risk further splitting time. New lines piling up. The result would be chaotic. The-
Then she froze. “Oh no.”
“What do you mean, oh no?” the Wombat asked carefully.
“There’s more splitting. She’s gone somewhere else. If she goes on like this-”
All at once the Green Moth came to a snap decision. “We need to go. Now.”
“What, go where-” Liz Flask started to say.
“Wait a minute-” the Wombat began.
“Hey, hey, what the-” Gaseous Girl said, suddenly alarmed.
They were too late; Ron Raven hadn’t even had the chance to start saying anything. The Green Moth tilted her head very slightly to the left. There was a very quiet, very small pop.
Just then the pizza place waitress returned. “Okay, y’all, anyone need refills or- Hey! Where’d y’all go?”
The entire team had indeed vanished, leaving behind only the half-eaten pizza lying forgotten on the checkered tablecloth.
This is so fun! I can’t wait to see where Meg goes next!
If you ask me Meg should have put together that it's impossible to go back to the time of dinosaurs in a way where the asteroid won't be a problem, it's a well known law of time travel. Can't wait to see how time gets further fucked up.