Full Circle

Her world grew colder day by day. A thin film of ice was inching its
way across the surface of the nearby pond. Snow, unknown in seasons
past, had become almost a daily occurrence. She didn't know that the
days were growing shorter. Neither did she know that the things she'd
witnessed would change the world forever.
It was a long, long time ago

An asteroid almost half the size of the moon, traveling at over fifty
thousand miles an hour, intersected the orbital path of the earth. At
its closest point it came within three thousand miles of the surface,
casting a grim shadow across the earth as it raced through the midday
sky. Fortunately, the moon was on the dark side of the planet when it
passed by, but the sheer mass of the asteroid produced spectacular
effects down on the surface. The immense gravitational attraction of
the stellar visitor caused tidal waves of epic proportions, as giant
tsunamis washed far up into the continental plains. More importantly,
the electrical charges generated by the metals within the moving mass
permanently altered the magnetic field of the planet, shifting its
poles by almost ten degrees. As the asteroid drew further and further
away from the earth the magnetic field of the sun reasserted its
influence over the planet. The earth began rotating towards its new
pole locations, changing the climate all over the world.
The asteroid was an infrequent visitor even by cosmic standards,
passing through this system only once every two hundred million years.
In its fifteen journeys through the system of Sol this was the closest
it ever came to any of its planetary bodies. Life on earth would have
to adapt quickly if it hoped to survive, but down on the surface it was
already too late. Another mindless force had been at work for almost
twenty years.

The jungle she called home was strangely silent, which was just as
well because lately every sound had caused her great discomfort. For
some reason the very sight of water filled her with agony. A full moon
shimmered off the lake below, a familiar but now painful sight. She was
dying of thirst, but she was salivating heavily. A thick and greenish
spittle dribbled freely from her jaws. She turned away from the water
and ambled off into the forest. Despite the pain it was time to find
something to eat. She had not eaten in days and the familiar pangs of
hunger were growing by the hour. Luckily, the task of finding food was
an easy one. The stench of rotting flesh filled the air and she had
only to follow her nose to find a meal. There were animal carcasses
scattered and strewn about the land, a sight she found a bit peculiar,
but not terribly important.
As the day wore on her energy began to wane. Sunlight caused her
unbelievable pain, and pain was something she understood. She managed
to drag herself deep into the forest where she found some respite from
the sunlight under the shade of the dense canopy, but when a passing
breeze ruffled the treetops above her a need to flee overwhelmed her.
As the leaves wavered gently in the wind the water they held rained
down upon her. As painful as the light was, the water tormented her
even more. She lumbered on until she came to a shaded quarry, a place
without water or sunlight, a place where she could rest her massive
body. Slowly, painfully, she managed to lay down under a thin rock
outcropping. She would move no more. Her great strength had vanished.
Her breathing was labored. Nothing was right in her world, nothing at
all. Her muscles ached, her eyes, even her teeth. Perhaps if she could
sleep
She would be the last of her kind. A few days later an earthquake
collapsed the outcropping above her, burying her remains under tons of
earth and rock. The jungle denizens would never again cringe at the
step of the fearsome Tyrannosaur, but none of the beasts would rejoice
at her passing. Death by any cause was still death, and death was in
the cards for almost all of them. The grasses and ferns that covered
the land went largely untouched as the plant eaters met the fate of the
last Tyrannosaur. The beasts had evolved through trial and error, but
evolution has no grand plan, no great purpose. It was neither good nor
evil, it simply was. Given enough time anything that could evolve would
evolve, and unfortunately for the giant reptiles that was precisely
what happened. Sixty-five million years ago a primordial swamp spawned
a terror unlike anything the world had ever known: a monstrous virus.
Less than twenty years later, not even a tick of the cosmic clock, it
had spread across the globe, and few would survive the short-lived
reign of the newborn king.
In a span of twenty years the earth suffered two of the greatest
disasters in its history, but neither would be remembered. The near
miss with the asteroid changed the world forever, but no evidence of
its passing remained. The plague was catastrophic, but the virus left
no lasting mark. Fifty thousand years later another cosmic wanderer
would spell disaster for life on planet earth, although it paled in
comparison to its predecessors. A mass of stone the size of a mountain
slammed into the earth at twenty five thousand miles an hour. This
meteor, like many cosmic bodies, contained a substantial amount of a
rare element called iridium. When it crashed into the earth it raised a
cloud that would reach every corner of the planet, depositing a layer
of telltale dust on the surface of the globe. Life on the planet was
still recovering from the loss of the dinosaurs, and now it faced
another challenge. Two seasons would be lost to the cloud of dust, and
two years could be an eternity.
As the sunlight waned most of the plant life on the surface perished,
and the competition for food became more brutal than ever before.
Thousands of species would be lost forever, but it would not mark the
end of life. The web of life had been damaged, but time and evolution
would mend it. As the dust from the meteor settled the cycles of change
began anew. The dead returned to the soil to take part in the rebirth
and the sun, no longer obstructed, once again shined its life-giving
energy on the planet surface. As time went by life gradually returned,
ultimately repopulating every nook and cranny. A Darwinian struggle
ensued as a rapidly growing animal population fought fiercely over an
abundant yet finite food supply. Many of the older species were unable
to adapt and soon disappeared, but new species quickly appeared to fill
the voids. In time one would be a naked ape.

Nine hundred feet below the surface of the polar ice lay the
fossilized remains of the Lady Tyrannosaur. She was a paleontologist's
dream. Her skeletal frame, frozen solid for thousands of millennia, was
almost intact and amazingly well preserved. A microscopic nightmare
still lurked inside her ancient bones.