Generally, we continued to celebrate birthdays only every ten to the power of the next incremental exponent years. In other terms, we'd usually multiply whatever birthday was celebrated last by ten. But occasionally, significant enough events had occurred at different intervals before my birth that Mary and I agreed, in their honor, that those other birthdays were also worthy of our attention.
Five Hundred Million years before my birth:
Some living thing slithered up on the shore, or bank, of some river, stream, lake, ocean, or just a rock along the edge of some random swamp.
Five Hundred Million since my birth:
I slithered toward the edge of our bed, trying my best not to disturb Mary but intent on spending some small portion of my birthday not tangled in our sheets and one another's limbs. We'd been awake until dawn, enjoying a phenomenal meteor shower on our rooftop deck. The meteor shower didn't begin until shortly after midnight, so Mary insisted it must be fireworks in celebration of my birthday, during which we intermittently diverted our attention to celebrating one another in our other usual ways. Besides our gazebo, our rooftop deck had become our favorite location to enjoy tantric sex. The views were unobstructed and breathtaking. Of course, we'd observed plenty of spectacular meteor showers over the many millions of years of our lives. Our more urgent reason for remaining awake for this event was that our AI Avatars had forewarned us to be alert for some potentially dangerous impacts.
We were safe from nearly any meteorite impacts. Usually, the layered shields of nanobots domed above us ground smaller objects to sparkling dust as they passed through. Massive fireballs were shattered explosively high in the night sky by projectiles of nanobots, fragments still glowing brightly as they rained down upon our protective dome, dancing along the sides like great swarms of descending fireflies. That alone was a show worth staying up late to experience.
But we were aware that we weren't entirely invulnerable. The most problematic meteors were those rare, tiny, unbelievably hard, heavy, dense objects moving at extreme velocities. These were bullets from which our shields and body armor could never protect us. If one of them penetrated our protective dome, we wouldn't survive. Fortunately, only a few of these had struck our Island in half a billion years. There, I said it: The B word. None had yet been near enough to endanger us since a fragment the size of a pea, having several million times the mass, ripping through the sky at speeds too fast to see except for the briefest of flashes, carried the potential energy of a nuclear explosion.
The point of impact of the nearest was also a relatively soft plot of dirt rather than hard exposed rock. That tiny dense nugget of rare metal drilled what had initially been a hole the diameter of a pencil into a deep subterranean pocket of water. The resulting geyser shot thousands of feet in the air, the upward force tearing a hole many times the diameter of the meteor, the water cooling to become a deep, blue pool, where we regularly visited to swim. It was an amazing experience to float, gazing down thousands of feet into its depths. Eventually, fish appeared in whatever mysterious way fish managed to find their way into bodies of water, having no contact with any other bodies of water. Birds were the most likely culprits, but we never caught them at it.
In addition to protecting ourselves from these larger, less dense meteors, we'd continually reclaimed stretches of beach repeatedly washed away by heavy, receding, then returning, tides over the years. Much of the debris from the exploded meteorites was the size and texture of exceptionally fine grains of sand. Our beaches were now a much darker color than the sand beaches they'd once been, much like several of the volcanic beaches we'd visited, with much the same velvety soft texture beneath our feet. We had also created beaches along our new eastern shore.
YOU ARE READING
The Words - An Autobiography
Science Fiction"What if God was one of us?" Credit to Eric Bazzilion, and thanks to Joan Osborne for singing his brain-rattling words. Much earlier, my mother promised that if I applied myself, I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up. Then, from somewhere, I r...
