Alma stands with her gun pointed at the figure clad in a black hoodie and camo pants. Flanking her to one side, Bammo brandishes a shovel, and to the other, Vangelis leans on his makeshift walking stick.
“What are you doing here?” Alma asks. “Who are you?”
“Relax.” The figure pulls back their hood, revealing their shaved head. “Put the gun away and I’ll fill you in. If I wanted to hurt you, I already would have. Besides.” They glance between the three of them, then out at the jungle. “I’m not your enemy here.”
Vangelis nods at Alma, and against her better judgement, she lowers her pistol.
“Come on, welcome to camp, make yourselves at home.” Their host turns and walks toward the center of the otherwise-deserted array of tents. They follow.
“Congratulations; you’ve discovered Forward Scout Station Six. I’m Ecksa.” The person named Ecksa plops down into a fabric chair.
“Are you stationed here?” asks Alma.
Ecksa smirks. “Hardly. Everyone stationed here is in the ground where your soldier boy found the shovel.” They point a finger toward Alma and grin. “Knew I recognized you. You’re one of the quartermasters. You shouldn’t be here. Ho boy. I mean, none of you should be here, but you really shouldn’t be here.”
Vangelis lowers himself gingerly into another chair. “You’re with Anodyne,” he guesses before Alma can say anything.
“Because there’s so many humans here who aren’t,” scoffs Ecksa. “Yes, I am. Engineering. I’ve been out here field testing some equipment. Took me longer than I expected and was hoping to resupply here.” They raise their eyebrows. “Apparently my map’s out of date, because all I found here was piles of bodies.”
“What happened?” Bammo asks.
“Looked like lightning,” says Ecksa, gesturing at the scarred trees and tents. “Odds of lightning striking so many people here are pretty low, though, so…” They offer a shrug. “Maybe an electrical generator accident or something, but I didn’t find a generator, either.”
“You said you knew we were coming.” Alma’s still standing. Something’s off about this, and she doesn’t like it. “How?”
“You seem jumpy. Don’t freak out, okay?” Ecksa points to their right arm, then draws back their sleeve to reveal what looks like a bulky forearm-mounted laser blaster from a science fiction movie. “It looks like a weapon, but it’s not. It’s an instrument that detects and analyzes biosignatures. Has a range of two miles and connects to these goggles.” They tap what look like a pair of sunglasses dangling around their neck. “That’s why I’m out here in the first place.”
“So we’re just supposed to believe you,” says Bammo. “You just happen to be out here, alone, in a camp full of dead bodies, right when —”
“Listen, dude, I don’t give a shit whether you believe me or trust me or anything,” says Ecksa. “Why should I trust you, wandering into this specific clearing with a gun pointed at me, right after I heard a massive explosion?”
‘The Knot blew up,” Vangelis says simply.
Unsurprisingly, Ecksa looks surprised. “That’s not good. You guys do it?”
“Oh, yeah,” Vangelis says calmly, looking around. “Figured it was time for a vacation, and what better way to do it than stranding myself in an alternate reality with a bunch of dinosaurs with rail guns?”
“They were making a delivery,” says Alma, gaze still stony, “and I was on my way to audit this camp site.”
Ecksa laughs out loud. “That’s adorable.” They slap their legs and stand up. “Well, it’s getting to be dinner time, and it looks like we’re all stuck here. You’re in luck, though — I just went shopping a couple hours ago. One of you wanna get a fire going? I’ve got meat stashed in a cooler in one of the tents over there.”
“I’m starved,” Vangelis says. “What’s on the menu?”
“Dino kebabs,” Ecksa calls over their shoulder as they walk away. “And these weird fruit things that are growing everywhere.”
“Hold on,” Alma says, hand on her gun again.
Ecksa turns back to face her, clearly annoyed. “What?”
Alma says nothing for a moment, trying to put her thoughts together. She shakes her head. “How are you so calm about all of this? Getting stranded in a dinosaur reality, stuck with three strangers in a camp full of people who died mysteriously — what do you know that we don’t?”
“Great points,” Ecksa says. “Genuinely, great. I was starting to think you were all stupid. I am starving, though, so how’s about I tell you as we cook? You can even come with me and point the gun at me if it makes you feel better.”
***
“So,” Ecksa says as they turn the kebabs over the fire, “nice fire, by the way, Bammo, you all know what we’re doing here, right? Like, Anodyne. We’re selling space-age, no, sorry, interstice-age weapons to a race of intelligent dinosaurs that hasn’t even developed a written language. On a scale of one to reprehensible, we’re at ‘smallpox blankets.’ Yeah?”
“That seems a bit harsh,” says Bammo.
Ecksa looks at him. “You must be new here.”
“He is,” says Vangelis. “Go on.”
“Why do the dinosaurs buy our guns?” Ecksa asks Bammo.
“That’s what I wanted to —”
They cut him off. “Because they want to get a leg up on other dinosaurs. It’s a one-sided arms race. Except it just got to be two-sided.”
“What’s that mean?” Bammo says. He’s starting to sound nervous.
“You were here today for a weapons drop, right?”
Bammo nods.
“Let me guess: the dinosaurs who showed up today were not the ones you were expecting.”
“How did you —”
Ecksa waves off Bammo’s surprise. “Completely inevitable. Sooner or later the victims would get wise and try to get their own guns.” Ecksa looks between Alma and Vangelis. “You two had to have seen it coming, at least.”
“It was always a possibility,” concedes Alma. Vangelis only nods.
“Now, of course, we were hoping we could sell to both sides. That’s what this whole thing was always about — leveraging both sides of the equation or whatever.” Ecksa sighs. “But the little guys were smarter than our corporate planners thought, surprise surprise, and instead of coming to us to buy, they decided cutting off the supply of weapons was smarter than getting their own guns to level the playing field. Which, you know, maybe it was.”
“But they did get their own guns,” says Alma, “at least a few, and they must be fairly confident that they can get more — enough to hold their own against their enemy. Our… original clients.”
Ecksa nods. They lean close to the fire to examine the kabobs. “Almost done. So there’s more to this story, though. Some of the dinosaurs are basically what we’d call psychic.”
Bammo snorts and Vangelis smirks, and even Alma looks like she’s about to smile.
“Not a joke. They have limited telepathic abilities and can sense ripples in probability, and a bunch of other stuff that we’re still figuring out. I mean, they, the dinos, certainly don’t understand it either, but it’s apparently a big part of the culture.”
“Like our shamans,” muses Alma. “Religion, mysticism as a way to interface with the unknown.”
“Yeah, sure, maybe,” Ecksa says with another shrug. “I’m an engineer, not a xenophilosopher. Anyway, one of Anodyne’s secret tactics is that we put a bounty on any and all psychic dinos — we call them seers — so we can do research on them.”
Bammo looks uncomfortable, like he’s finally getting the picture. “And by research you mean —”
Ecksa spreads their arms and makes air quotes, and gives a huge wink. “‘Research,’ yes, you know, figuring out the secrets of nature’s deepest mysteries or whatever. And also deprive them — both sides — of their greatest asset, just in case things ever get ugly. Like they apparently did today.”
“Have we figured anything out about them?” asks Alma despite herself. “The psychic — the seers?”
Ecksa pulls the kebabs off the fire one at a time and distributes them. “A bit. They’ve got certain amino acids and naturally occurring compounds in higher concentrations than other dinosaurs. It’s kind of like vitamins — if your body could make vitamin C or something. But, like, if vitamin C also gave you psychic powers, and you were a dinosaur. It’s pretty complicated, from what I understand, but that’s the gist.”
Alma takes a bite of the meat. “This is good,” she says.
“Fresh dinosaur,” Ecksa replies, and pats the instrument attached to their right arm. “This bad boy makes hunting a breeze.”
The sky is almost dark as they chew in silence. We must have been hungry, Alma thinks. Maybe running for your life from armed dinosaurs does that.
After a few minutes, Bammo pauses to look appreciatively at the kabob. “You know, it might not be as profitable as developing weapons, but, dino barbecue? I feel like that’s got some marketability. Get the right sauce, a few spices…?”
Vangelis shakes his head. “Something awful messed up about that.” He stares up at the sunset sky. “You put pepper on these, Ecksa? Tastes like some of those Sichuan peppercorns.”
“Oh,” Ecksa says around a full mouth, “right, sorry, so sometimes, eating this dinosaur meat, people get, like,” they swallow, “you know I said some of the dinos have those different vitamins or whatever? Comes off as a weird taste, at least to some people. Hopefully doesn’t make anybody sick; I’m pretty sure it’s cooked all the way through.”
“I don’t taste anything,” Alma says. “I mean, the meat, but nothing like that.” She shrugs. “So what else do you know that we don’t, Ecksa?”
Ecksa freezes, as though stunned. Their eyes rotate toward Alma. “Hmm?”
“You were saying you had pieces of the puzzle we didn’t. About Anodyne, or the dinosaurs, or the camp, or —”
“Oh! Right, sorry. Well, uh, there’s an ansible here. Don’t know if you knew that, but at least we’ll be able to contact home base to figure out some kind of extraction plan.”
As they’re talking, Vangelis stands up stiffly, stretches, shakes his head a little bit. He extends one arm, splays his fingers, inspects them.
“You alright, my man?” asks Bammo.
Vangelis is still staring at his outstretched hand. “I don’t usually feel this way.”
Ecksa says, “It’s probably just the —”
There’s a crackle of energy and a bolt of lightning leaps from Vangelis’ hand to the trees in front of him.
Vangelis hurtles backwards toward Bammo, screaming and clutching his hand in pain as the younger man, caught off-balance, manages to catch him.
Alma, already on her feet, stares back and forth between her fallen comrade and the flames in the undergrowth that are already dying out.
“Huh,” says Ecksa nonchalantly, sitting back in their chair, their mouth twisting a little in contemplation. “Guess we can add that to the list of side effects.”
Hello hello!
Involuntary lightning seems bad but at least it’s not prion disease! That’s what I always tell myself, anyway.
I just got back from a lovely vacation back home to Vermont where I was able to see at least several friend and families and go sugaring (maple sugaring, that is). I wanted to see more people! If I didn’t see you and / or your cat, I’m sorry! But there will be next time. That is a threat.
If you’re wondering why Ecksa spent longer than expected in Dino Strand, one reason is that that’s just how field testing goes, but another reason is that they couldn’t find the camp using their biosignature detector because everyone in the camp was fried. That’s what they told me, anyway. Whether you believe them or not is totally up to you.
In the coming weeks I will be doing substantial editing and re-ordering of the remainder of Season 2’s episodes because I’m still figuring out the best way to get to the end. And there is most certainly an end. So we all have those things to look forward to.
I’ve also re-realized that I’m using The Interstice as a worldbuilding experiment, telling stories that set up events and establish rules and that sort of thing — because those things are much easier to figure out when they’re attached to characters and events (because apparently that’s how reality works?). When I was little and would play with my Star Wars action figures, I’d spend a long time setting up elaborate scenarios and then have no idea how to play with them because I already knew everything that was supposed to happen, and I’ve discovered that I do the same thing with my writing. All that to say — I’m currently working on at least two other projects that will be playing in the sandbox I’ve set up in The Interstice, and I’m very excited about both (or perhaps more; I’m not great at math). Stay tuned for more information!
I think that’s all from me for today. As always, thank you, reader, for reading! See you next time.
:: Jaer