About the author
This is a nearly 18,000 foot smoking volcano from the Cholula pyramid complex, which is a few hours from Chixculub, This was during the annual equinox festival during the minute of the spring equinox in Cholula (around 3:30 on March 20, 2023). This did entail shooting into the sun. I do consider myself a good scientist and a passible bci-fi author; I never said much about photography skills.
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Beneath ChIcxulub by Brendan ZaChary AllIson
“Fred,” she spat. “It’s that drilling again. Will you go kill those upstairs neighbors?”
“Mmmph. Too early. Just ignore it. Need sleep.” He buried his ears under nice, warm pillows.
”I know it’s too early, but we’ve been ignoring it for decades.” She nudged him. “It’s getting louder.”
Fred grunted, then rolled over and checked the alarm. “Wilma! Wake up! Now! The alarm didn’t go off!”
“Huh? How long were we out?”
“65 million Earth years. But the alarm’s broken. It should have gone off about ten thousand years ago.” He rubbed his top eyes and splashed cold lava on his faces. “You want coffee?”
“Need time to wake up. At least gimme 3 years.” She rolled over, then jerked as Fred threw lava on her.
“Too long. Initiating emergency neurostimulation procedure,” Fred replied. ”Sorry, this will hurt.”
Fred thought a command and then they both started writhing as their CBIs overstimulated their hyperthalami. A display popped up with both their names and a graph with “Kiloneuricles” that started around 2 and slowly increased. A voice kept repeating: “What’s the cube root of nine Googleplex factorial?” After a few months, Wilma started screaming numbers, then the stimulation and writhing both stopped. Wilma’s graph read 77.673 Petaneuricles. Fred was around 3 Kiloneuricles. Fred and Wilma looked at each other silently.
“Fred, your stimulator is also malfunctioning. Like the alarm. The impact must have caused more damage than expected.” Fred looked back, confused. Wilma sighed. “Doesn’t matter, Fred. Only one of us needs to be smart.” She shook his leg-shoulders. “Listen, Fred. Think.” Fred frowned. “OK, just listen then.”
Fred yawned and rubbed his left lower lateral chin. “So I was writhing in agony for months for nothing?”
“I said just listen. The only reasonable explanation for the drilling is that the mice evolved enough to drill down into the crater we created. There’s no way we failed to kill off the dinosaurs. All of our models were correct. The mice evolved enough brainpower for harvesting as planned. They’re bipedal, much bigger, brains weigh about a kilo and a half, good for a few dozen kiloneuricles each.”
“Like me now. Er, no – wait.” She waited. He yawned. “So we could overstimulate them to, um… about…”
“I said don’t think. We can overstimulate them to about a meganeuricle each before they seize. More than enough to harvest for brainpower. Hm. They’d have the technology to drill into this crater for decades. Need to check some assumptions.” Her eyes glazed over for a millisecond. “At least the universal antenna still works. Everything is confirmed. The mice call themselves humans. They call our asteroid Chicxulub. They think it was an accident but that’ll change soon. And they’d be… curious….”
“I’m curious if that coffee’s ready?”
“Dammit, Fred! They’re dumber but faster! We’re already damaged, our pressure-shields aren’t designed for drills, we need to get to the surface before one of those drills – ”
Author Commentary
I wrote this in March 2023.
I’ve always been fascinated by Chicxulub. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. It does seem eerily perfect for us humans. It was powerful enough to take out the dinosaurs, but not wipe out our evolutionary ancestors.
One premise is that Chicxulub wasn’t an accident. I checked this premise with Dr. Kevin Grazier, a planetary physicist and sci-fi expert, who hadn’t heard of it. This does not constitute extensive background research, and if anyone’s heard of it, please tell me.
Another premise is that these aliens operate on a different time scale, which creates tension around the trade-off between technological vs. temporal superiority. A couple episodes of Star Trek (classic and Voyager) present aliens who are much faster than us.
The story also assumes uses “neuricles,” which I’ve used elsewhere (such as BaItCoIn Farming) to refer to neural processing units. These are presumably valuable and rare resources referring to information processing capability.
I’ll ponder better names for the two characters that Fred and Wilma.
Realism
This is more in the realm of fantasy than fiction. Was Chicxulub intentional? Could anything survive the impact? If so, wouldn’t they have other technologies to achieve different goals? Could aliens predict the developments over the subsequent 65 million years that accurately? Are “neuricles” so valuable that aliens would go through all this trouble and wait 65 million years to harvest them? How do BCIs work with alien brains? And so on.
Hope
The ending is open to interpretation. Did the drill penetrate the aliens’ ship? If so, did it kill them? Did the humans realize that aliens were below Chicxulub? If the aliens survived, what next? They might have completed their plan or gotten thrashed by humans who then learned and exploited their technology. Are we looking at hope from the perspective of aliens or humans?
bcifi 