Speculative Flash Fiction - Text and Audio
An Earlier Inconvenient Truthby Larry Hodges
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Larry Hodges of Germantown, Maryland has 30 short story sales , including recent ones to Weird Tales, Abyss & Apex, and Space & Time. Visit him at www.larryhodges.org.
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Sixty-five million years ago, the documentary An Inconvenient Truth was breaking all records at the box office. Yet the director -- a chubby, brown Albertosaurus -- was depressed as he ate his lunch, barely noticing the bits of gore dribbling out the corners of his jaws.
"Most dinosaurs agree with my film," he said, "yet nobody will do anything about the global cooling problem." He grimaced as he put another chunk of vegetarian meat in his mouth. His thick glasses made him look bug-eyed.
(continued below)
His wife, Tippany, bared her teeth as she grinned at him. Tall, svelte, and green, she wore a fern necklace she had made that morning before they had set out for their picnic in the forest. The scent of moist earth and conifers filled the air. Insects buzzed, and chirping Compsognathuses ran about on the picnic cloth at their feet. Occasionally Tippany tossed scraps to the tiny dinosaurs.
"What do you expect, Al?" she said, as she stuffed a gob of the green meat in her mouth. "Anyone can plunk down five Stegosaurus plates and see the movie, but do you really expect them to go back to hunting and killing other dinosaurs? That's barbaric!" She reached over with a handkerchief and wiped the gore off his face.
"We have no choice," he said. "My film proves that the decrease in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere coincides exactly with our cultivation of meat plants. Those crops are just CO2 guzzlers, converting it to oxygen faster than animals can convert it back."
"Yes, dear, I've seen the documentary with you at six premieres." She yawned, stretching out her thirty-foot body. "Less CO2 means less heat gets trapped in the atmosphere, so temperatures go down."
"And yet they laugh at me!" He looked down distastefully at the meat plant pie in front of him. "They say global cooling isn't happening, and if it is, it isn't dinosaur made, that it's just weather fluctuations. As if that solves the problem. I tell you, if we keep growing these meat plants, the Earth will grow colder and colder, and we'll all freeze to death. The only ones who'll survive will be those tiny, warm-blooded mammals."
"A world dominated by mammals!" Tippany exclaimed. "And you wonder why they laugh at you?"
"Did you see the latest?" Al said, pulling a bowl of vegetarian meat barbecue from their picnic basket and staring at it in disgust. "Super Size Me, a documentary on the supposed dangers of living off dinosaur meat? It's stupid! Our ancestors ate dinosaur meat for millions of years, and suddenly they claim it's unhealthy? We'd still be eating real meat if the duckbills hadn't invented meat plants to get us to stop eating them."
"Average life spans have gone up a lot since we went vegetarian," Tippany said. "Maybe there's something to it. Morgan makes a compelling case."
"Morgan's an idiotic T-Rex; what does he know? He ate quarter-tonners for a month -- that's a lot of duckbills! -- so of course he had health problems and gained all that weight. Has he brainwashed everyone into forgetting we didn't have universal health coverage until, oh, about the exact same time our life spans began to go up? And that those who couldn't afford health insurance were dying for lack of health care? A coincidence?"
"Of course not, dear. Your documentary Sicko showed the problems in the health care industry. See, your films can do good!"
"But what's the point? An Inconvenient Truth is kicking Super Size Me's tail, 50 million Stegosaur plates to their 20, and yet we're still growing meat plants all over the world. Remember Dentistry for Cretaceous, my documentary that showed that 90 percent of violent crime is teeth related? Didn't change a thing."
She addressed him by his middle name. "Now Michael, what more can you expect? Did you really expect everyone to agree to have their teeth pulled?"
"It would be a safer world if they did. But global cooling, that's a much worse problem. We have to stop it, and the only way to do that is to stop growing meat plants and go back to eating real meat." He pushed aside the barbecue, and felt around the picnic basket for something else to eat. He came up with meat plant jerky, and stared in dismay at the hard, green surface.
"But I like meat plants," she said, and plunged her snout into the vegetarian meat barbecue.
"What do you think's going to happen if CO2 levels keep dropping? There's got to be a way to convince the world of the danger!" He tossed the jerky aside and watched the pack of Compsognathuses devour it.
She pulled her jaws out of the barbecue. "Perhaps you could do another documentary?"
"Yeah, when we're freezing our tails off, I'll do that. I'll call it Fahrenheit 11, since that's what I figure the average global temperature will drop to. I just hope Morgan's still around so I can bite off his puny little arms."
The huge asteroid struck near the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, kicking up dust worldwide, which blocked out the sun, leading to dropping temperatures. However, there were no sentient creatures to observe or record the event, since worldwide temperatures were already down to eleven degrees Fahrenheit. Littering the planet were the frozen bodies of dead dinosaurs.
Lying directly in the path of the asteroid when it struck was the body of a T-Rex, whose puny little front arms had been bitten off.
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