Cowritten by @trashcaster@open-source-eschaton.net
The asteroid hadn’t killed the dinosaurs, their friend had been telling them the other day. It was the debris from the impact. Everything bigger than a chicken was either killed by the poisoned atmosphere or starved in the weeks after, searching for the large prey that their ecosystem no longer supported. The scavengers dined on poisoned meat, and the smallest of the creatures with the hardiest of stomachs had managed to scrape out some meager existence on their new, damaged planet. These scavengers were their lineage, their deep ancestry rooted in twisting, underground burrows. They had survived the asteroid by the skin of their teeth, now handed every horizon in the eons to follow.
Our species first dreamt of dragons as an outlet for the ancient fears harbored by those early mammalian minds. We abstracted the terror we felt about reptilian biology into a single beast, embodying remorselessness, fury, and death. To defeat such a beast would be to embolden ourselves past our most potent fears and into the province of the deific. So was the dream, so was the fantasy, and such was the reality of the human situation as the planetary apex predators for so long. But a population’s growth is always contained within the environment enabling it, and it would seem, to any that could appreciably see, that the Earth was actually hatching. We were bacteria on the surface of its shell.
Privileged populations tend to grow. The human civilizational enterprise epitomized our evolutionary privilege. We grew quickly upon the fountainhead of petroleum and suffered the consequences of a changing climate. Growing dissatisfaction with the ability of corporations and the governments they puppeteered to properly regulate and maintain this situation pressured investors toward geothermal extraction, which was believed, if done right, to be able to supply enough electricity to sustain the world’s economies with marginally less oversight. Solar technology had never gotten off the ground with enough efficiency to be an immediate option, and at the point being reached, immediate options were needed. The plan, put all too simply, was to punch holes in the Earth’s crust, collect the resultant heat, and convert it into electricity. We were an unwitting creature searching a cave.
No one could tell each other what was happening on their respective sides of the world, but no one would need to in order to recognize their mutual disaster. The columns of smoke were visible from every horizon as humankind was collectively veiled from the stars, eyes blurry with the force of the tremors. It wasn’t any kind of natural disaster, if you tend to associate ‘natural’ with the absence of sentience. It seemed straight out of the terrible fantasies of cultures myriad. It was to be a coincidence — or a convergence, rather — of a scale that none would live to appreciate.
Its massive head reared, filling the collapsing sky. A neck like a mountain was turning, an eye like a sun was emerging from some tectonic eyelid...