Kitty Time Travel

by Horia Hulea

  Chapter 6

  "As you already know from the natural history classes, we are not the first sentient species that has walked on the surface of this planet. Before us, nature evolved the sentient trait in the naked monkeys, around ten-million years ago. However, due to various obvious factors, it seems that that species went extinct. You will hear different theories and different angles from different professors, some brilliant and others not so brilliant (the theories, not the professors).

  "Keep them in mind, but you will have to remember: when you re back there in time, most of them will be wrong. So, you just stick to the facts and facts alone. We don't want your opinions on the monkeys or what you think of what they said or what you believe they thought. We simply want the description of what the monkeys did.

  "You will be just an observer … so simply observe and record, and we, the brilliant minds of this nation, will draw the conclusions and will come up with the theories."

  The little kitty is all ears, and his head is shaking up and down, up and down, up and down, because he has to look knowledgeable. He can't disappoint all these smart professors. That, and the fact that Professor Meowsky is a very scary-looking cat.

  "Only facts, no opinions, got it!"

  The circle of old scruffy professors that lived their entire agoraphobic lives between too many walls full of treaties and deep studies closes in on the young Virtuous Pupil.

  "What we know for a fact is that all the archeological sites from that period had a lot of cow skeletons. And by a lot, I mean a LOT. Everywhere you dig in the human historical layers, cows seem to pop up all over the place. Cow bones, cow DNA, cow skin, cow milk proteins, cow horns, you name it. There is no natural explanation for this kind of cow presence. Cows simply didn't have the ability to demographically explode to such a number on their own. That is why, as a historian, you first have to wonder 'Why there were so many cows? What made them so special?' And what we know is that the increase in cow population happened in sync with the humans. The cow numbers simply exploded just before the great extinction. And that right there is no coincidence!"

  Professor Meowsky points to a very important underlined graph.

  "From the data—and the data does not lie!—there were billions of cows. Forests the size of continents were simply cleared just to raise food for cows! Endless fields of genetically modified plants were intensively harvested to feed the cows! Armies of humans were dedicated only to making sure that the food and water supply chain remained unbroken for the cows. Think of all the massive investments done by the humans to acquire this kind of knowledge: from chemistry and physics to genetics and engineering. Think of all the resources that went into these planet-scale projects: clearing vast expansions of land, planting intensively vast expansions of crops, modifying genetically all their crops to suit the bovine diet? All, all, all just to keep the cows breeding and feeding!"

  Panting and resuming.

  "Imagine our shock when we discovered that right before the extinction over 60% of the food of the entire planet was dedicated to feeding the cows while less than 10% was dedicated to directly feeding human. And the puzzling thing is that the cows are … how should I put it more simply? 'Dumb' is not the word I am looking for…. Cows are just big, stupid, lumbering Things. But apparently that didn't prevent the humans from Africa from starving to death so that their crops would go to the cows! Never in the history of the planet Earth has a species used another species to this extent. Just from the raw numbers, the vast majority of a naked monkey life was dedicated directly or indirectly to raising cows. Their entire array of innovations and technology was directed toward increasing the number of cows, to the point where the cattle were the largest population of animals on the entire planet. Cows outnumbered as body mass any species of cold- or warm-blooded animals that ever existed at that point in the entire history of the Earth!"

  The silence is eerie, and the kitty begins to feel scared of the big, bad cows.

  "Now tell me, what conclusions can be inferred from this?"

  Silence. A fly is trying to find its way through a window.

  "If one species works tirelessly to serve the other … if one species dedicates its entire time and economy and efforts to raise millions of the other, putting the resources of the entire planet at risk, then there is only one conclusion: the cows had the monkeys as their slaves!"

  The Virtuous Pupil makes a face that reads, A-haaa, that makes perfect sense!

  But the professor continues unabated: "Did the cows have telepathic powers? Did the cows have a special type of pheromones or other chemicals that made humans lose their mind? How did the cows manage to make humans their slaves? Because, from all the data, the monkeys had the technology and the energy sources to be completely independent of the cows! The humans could

  live carefree without the cows, but in the end, the cows seem to have doomed the monkeys!"

  The professor turns to some doodle graphics on the wall and continues, "Based on these calculations, the monkeys were working themselves literally to death, day and night, to raise the cows and keep them fed, while the cows were growing in number until an entire planet with all its resources was dedicated to one only purpose: COW REARING!"

  BAM! The paw strikes the charts with all the numbers and all the percentages.

  The conclusion is like an ultimate sentence!

  And this is indeed the most accepted theory in the academic circles, simply because the piles of cow skeletons bursting from every archeological site are too obvious to ignore.

  "So you see, my young fur ball, you have to go back in time and see what made the monkeys bow to their cow overlords!"

  Professor Meowsky retires in the shadows, purring with the satisfaction of delivering such an intelligent and dramatic presentation. He turns his head to look at the other sorry academic-looking bags of fleas with an expression that says, Let's see if you can beat that!

  And then, from the same shadows, another old cat jumps up, his walking saying, You just watch me!

  "ALIENS!"

  The entire room booms from his voice, and the scared kitty starts looking left and right for a bed to hide.

  "No, no. Not in this room," says Professor Purrocious.

  "I mean aliens, as in they are the cause of human extinction. It is plain obvious!"

  New charts, new graphics, and new pictures are put on the board while the old ones are discarded dramatically on the floor.

  "Imagine a race like the humans that achieves a higher level of intelligence. Even if their intelligence was not as high as ours, that race will present a threat to the galactic powers to be. The monkeys would have been able to start conquering space in a matter of centuries. They would have been able to take over the galaxy just like that. Remember, little fur ball, that things like these become a reality especially when you have the technology to make ceramic tooth fillings! Because apart from the cow bones, the other thing that littered the archeological sites are the ceramic tooth fillings. And we all know that those are pretty expensive and hard to make!"

  Professor Purrocious looks around to check if anyone is contradicting him.

  No?

  Then let's continue.

  "Imagine that you are the alien civilization and you are enjoying blissfully your newly conquered galaxy, when BAM! The monkeys are all over your planets, claiming their share as the new galactic competitor. That will make any alien very, very angry. So my hypothesis is that the aliens wiped out the monkeys race the moment they invented flight!"

  "Flying monkeys! Pff!" sneers a member of the group of scruffy cats.

  "Yes, yes, laugh all you want! I know everyone thinks, 'Professor Purrocious only comes up with the crazy stuff,' but if you can make ceramic tooth fillings, then you can invent flying machines! Even if we don't have any proof that the monkeys could fly, the theory of aliens wiping out the humans still stands! From the observations that we have, a lot of strange objects are orbiting our planet. They are as real as
it gets, and from the look of it, they are artificial satellites that were put there by a far more advanced civilization than ours. The alien overlords are observing us right now! They are following the level of our evolution, and when we get our paw too deep into the technology jar … BAM! They will get us extinct just like they did with the humans!"

  As the dramatic BAM fades, the professor retreats mysteriously into the shadows.

  Only to be followed by another fur-patched cat.

  "While I agree with the alien hypothesis, I believe my theory is more extraordinary—"

  "No, it's not more extraordinary than my theory."

  "Can I talk now? Can I talk? You had your presentation time, now let me talk, ok?"

  "Yeah, you can talk. But you can't compare your theory with mine."

  "I can do whatever I like because it's my theory!"

  "Don't let the cat get his tongue. He has stuff to say."

  "Thank you! Thank you! The aliens did not wipe the human race out of concern for their expansion. Instead…"

  Hold your breath!

  "…the aliens tried to colonize this very planet!"

  And release breath.

  "The most recent archeological diggings that were done last week"—Professor Scratcher raises his paw together with his voice—"indicate that the aliens attempted to build their own colonies right here! The noble humans sacrificed themselves in fighting a continuous war repelling this invasion. They won this war, and they managed to keep the aliens off this planet."

  Silence.

  Then from the audience:

  "Pray tell, what last week evidence have your cats dragged out?"

  "My students discovered a site with a high concentration of uranium."

  Silence again.

  "Uranium that was unmistakably shaped in bars used for construction! We all know that uranium doesn't occur naturally just like that. You need some very advanced technology and expensive methods to get it. And that is alien technology proof!"

  "Uranium?"

  "Yes. And this was not present only at one site! But several! The aliens managed to build their radioactive habitats in only a very few places before they were repelled. The shape of the radioactive metal is without a doubt the shape of alien construction components for their colonies. My theory is that the humans left this planet! They left in a mass migration! The Earth climate changed dramatically because of the war against alien colonization, and since the humans had the technology to make tooth fillings, they had also built an entire fleet of spaceships and traveled to the next habitable planet! They never went extinct. They left, and never came back!"

  "Uranium?" Some whispers are still going about in the shadows.

  Somewhere behind the entrance, the Master Scientist watches how the scruffy old cats are arguing in front of a very puzzled kitty.

  The human extinction has been a topic of debate for centuries. Even when he was a student, he had been a cow overlords believer. But after a while, it was no longer the theories that had him worried.

  Aliens, viruses, climate change, cow farts, they were all nice and had solid evidence to back them up. But what scared him was the suddenness of the extinction. Now you have happy humans doing whatever naked monkeys did, and the next thing you know: Poof! No more monkeys!

  None.

  Not even a goodbye note.

  They looked everywhere for a crater or a trace of an asteroid hitting the Earth. No super volcano erupting. No burst of radiation from a neighboring supernova. No solar flame scorching the planet. Nothing!

  But something did happen, and all the monkeys were gone, leaving behind nothing but ceramic teeth and gold rings with diamonds. And lots and lots of cow bones.

  It seemed that all the greatest achievements ever done by humans turned to dirt while all the useless crap nobody cared about lasted for eons and remained as proof of our existence. There was absolutely no trace of any of the great metropolitan cities holding the millions of people, no traces of the roads or bridges linking nations.

  Everything gone.

  Everything except the ceramic tooth fillings, that is!

  You would expect a pyramid to survive a million years, or a skyscraper, or an underground nuclear bunker, or a city made of steel and glass, or anything relevant. If only one single hard drive with pictures—just pictures!—of the humans' achievements somehow managed to survive a million years. Just one lousy hard drive … but it seems that one million years is a lot of time.

  The skyscrapers crashed, the glass became sand which was blown by eons of wind, the walls crumbled and became pebbles, the metal rusted away into dust, and everything else was taken over by plants, then eaten by millions of hungry mouths—and then pooped by millions of happy asses. Then the waste was washed by rains, and then sucked by placid plants again and again and again, so many times that nobody will ever recognize what was before a phone or a book or a shoe or anything.

  But what about the multi-generational bunkers hidden deep in the Earth? What about the long-forgotten tunnels linking islands and drilled into mountains?

  Didn't they last?

  Surely they will let the future know about the paramount of species, the beacon of intelligence, the most amazing jewel in the crown of animal kingdom that was the homo sapiens?

  Was there absolutely nothing left behind with the writing "look upon our workings, ye mortals, and despair"?

  Well … it seems that in the end every bunker and tunnel and other construction marvel has one mortal nemesis: time. You can insulate and isolate a nuclear bunker for a century, even for a thousand years, but a hundred thousand years? Micro-fissures in the walls become cracks, and after another hundred thousand years, the cracks become holes and cavities—and what do you know? In one million years, everything inside those rooms collapses and turns to mud. Even if a bunker could withstand a nuclear attack and cosmic ray bombardment in its present day, it won't be able to withstand the simple passing of a million years.

  That is how, without further ado, all human creation turned eventually to dirt, and all our movies, videos, and sounds became extinct, and all the books, papers, and paintings, all the blogs and the comments that have been ever said on all the forums, all the selfies and group photos, the amazing ass of the most famous singer, and the latest revolutionary physics theories about quantum and strings just vanished away.

  All the stuff that is human stops together with the human species, because if human activity stops, the human tracks in history get blown away by the winds of time.

  And in one million years, the only things that will remain from us are the tooth fillings, diamond rings, and bathroom ceramic.

  And those will serve as proof of technology for the future.

  "Hey, look! The humans were able to make ceramic tooth fillings; therefore, they had to have some kind of civilization and advanced technology!"