It wasn’t long before a hole appeared outside of our research station on the ice, and animal ancients began climbing out, beseeching newness.
We watched from the windows, inches thick to prevent the cold, as a 1,000-pound ground sloth emerged, slow as the days are long. It used claws as handholds and footholds to hurl itself forward.
It looked around, shivered (shouldn’t it freeze to death? one my bedmates asked) and crawled toward the horizon.
We watched for hours until it disappeared into the whiteout gusts. Then, we went to bed, wide-eyed and wondering what might pop up next.
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The next morning was a woolly rhinoceros.
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Three days later, a Titanoboa slithered up and out.
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A week after that a creature appeared that we couldn’t decipher, only gasp and point at and yell My God, what is that thing?
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It was the winterover months, so we were dead in the water from any planes and communications had fizzled after the hole appeared. It would take weeks before the first supply plane appeared, filled with boxes of fresh greens, equipment for the research we didn’t remember to do, mail, and—Christ, we hoped—ripe tomatoes. But now, instead of that delicious fruit, we watched the windows, ate fat- and protein-heavy meals that grew more stale by the day, and went to bed sleepless, imagining what might pour forth next.
We were scientists. Data eccentrics. We careened as south as Earth would allow, away from the people and societies that harmed and divided us. We were deserted problem solvers, equation nerds, and efficiency fanatics. We took turns cleaning toilets without complaint.
Shouldn’t we lower something into the hole? Take samples? Find a goddamn video camera that worked?
None of us could bring ourselves to leave the station. Our knees shook at the thought. What if something climbed out when we went out there? Even worse, what if we wanted to climb in? Mostly, we were worried about the latter. The hole was blue, a perfect circle, an expertly carved orgasmic dream to a mathematician’s numeric thought process or an artists’ eye.
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One day after that, the really weird shit started.
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Animals appeared with gadgets attached, skin grown over them, stretched and taught. Abscesses of VCRs, landline phones, CD players. A lizard climbed out chewing on the biggest USB cable we’d ever seen. A day after that, a short-faced bear the size of a McDonalds shimmied out, plopped onto the ice, and rubbed at its eye, which was a Packard Bell mouse, crusted over with pus.
One night, we awoke jittery to the sound of bells. We ran to the windows and watched a flock of pterodactyls attempt to take flight shouldering a pinball machine. They were seemingly melted into the legs and sides of the contraption. They flapped their wings — bonus — and screeched against the moaning weight — try again!
And me? What did I do? I reached out and touched the glass. I knew that machine. My cousins had one in their basement. A Night of the Living Dead pinball machine that projected screams with each bonus point. The buttons on the side were always sticky from some sort of fluid: apple juice, soda, or alcohol. The lights blinked from brilliant bulbs of yellow, red, and brown.
That’s my cousin’s, I said aloud. My bedmates stared at me as if I had become one of the creatures outside.
But they couldn’t say it was beyond belief for such a thing to be true.
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Not long after that, a fucking sea monster crawled out with an Atari buried in its nostrils.
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We coped as the days wore on. We sketched, tried to remember each creature as it came up and left us. We were tired and scared. So alone. Had the creatures gone and returned the items attached to them, finding our families, presenting the contraptions as if to say here, you forgot about this?
You used to love this way back in the day.
— Screech —
— Caw —
— Beep! Beep! —
— BONUS! —
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We turned off the lights in the station and shut down the machines inside. We wrapped ourselves in blankets and wore all the clothes we brought with us. We smelled of awe and oldness, huddling together at the windows, shining spotlights on the hole, and watched as memory and history appeared.
Weeks passed.
We were reduced to communicating in the beeps and blips of the machines brought out of the hole. The shrieks of animals who realized the world had changed.
If the world began again, newly fashioned, then we could at least beep! and boop! to each other that yes, we were given gifts and did nothing. We only watched. But we saw it first.
We were there. Are still here.
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Lyndsie Manusos’s work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Barrelhouse, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and other publications. She lives in Indianapolis with her family and writes for Book Riot and Publishers Weekly.