Member-only story
Time Travel Sucks
The unspoken downside of the world’s most elite form of tourism.
Freezing again
Night in a cave with a tribe of Homo Erectus, and I’m angry. Last night I tossed and turned on a stone floor with a heap of bat guano for a pillow and the stench of my unwashed hosts surrounding me. That I can forgive. You expect that when you time travel. That doesn’t make me angry. What makes me angry… is Urg.
Urg. What a moron. This morning I watched him banging two rocks together for no discernible reason other than the persistent boredom of existing 2 million years before Netflix. I saw him observe the sparks smash off those rocks, lighting the adjacent dry grass on fire. And what did Urg do with this startling observation? Did he catalyze it into the single most important discovery of his species? Did he carry that flame into the cave to light a bonfire to warm his family?
No. He stamped it out, howling in fear, and ran back to the cave to chew ants. No wonder they went extinct.
Last night I was content to shiver because fire hadn’t been discovered yet. Now that I have visual confirmation that fire has been discovered, that at least one creature on this planet, Moron Urg, has knowledge of fire, the cold is particularly unbearable.