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from the journal of dr. catherine vrais...
Pikaia won.
That is to say, of all the myriad of strange and gorgeous fauna that crept and swam through the Cambrian ocean, Pikaia gracilens--a little finned worm, at 40mm no longer than your index finger--became the ancestor of all of phylum Chordata and subsequently most life on this earth.
It didn't have to happen that way. The powerful Anomalocaris genus was by all rights the lordly class of the Cambrian era. The largest of them were as long as two meters--long as you are tall, or longer. They were the apex predators, lords of all they surveyed. They fed on Pikaia, trilobites, sea-scorpions, Wiwaxia, Yohoia, Laggania cambria... But even they became a mere footnote in history, forgotten until a fortunate discovery in Canada's Burgess Shale.
That, of course, is not the really interesting part of the story. The scientists are still arguing over how to classify many of these little wonders, whether they are athropods or lobopods or a new phylum unto themselves, unique and extinct forever. Well--it's that "forever" part that's gotten a little tricky recently.
Our story begins, as these often do, at night.
None of us at the Institute are quite sure what triggered the quake. Yes--I say "triggered", because we've learned the fault lines around here, well enough to know when the quakes are coming and how to release their pent-up energy in smaller shivers and shakes to keep such devastating events from occurring.
We didn't cause this one.
In the early hours of the morning--two o'clock ante meridian, as it was--the first little trembles began. I was knocked from a restless slumber and dreams stitched with threads of earths that could-have-been, roamed by creatures with impossible forms and dreamlike beauty. Had those pre-shocks not awakened me I may not be alive to tell you this story today, for the quake that followed was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I dove beneath my desk when I realized it was more than just a trembler, and it was good I did so.
Once the shaking stopped, two minutes later, my entire room had been destroyed, save for the heavy wooden desk I huddled under. The lights were off, but a strange golden glow suffused my ruined room--from my window. When I could extricate myself from where I had sought shelter, afraid of the ominous silence of the building and every creak that could herald a sudden collapse of the entire Institute, I was more concerned for my colleagues and even the rest of the nation than I was for that glow.
I forgot about it for two days, as we as a state and a nation dealt with our injured and dead and began to rebuild from the quake. On the evening of the second day, though, I found myself out on the cliffs--a foolish, foolish place to be!--overlooking the Pacific, watching the sun go down. But once it had sunk below the horizon and the fire in the sky had died down, I thought I could see that same golden glow again. I squinted--in disbelief, I think--to see a line of light beneath the surface of the ocean, winding its way off to the distant curvature of the Earth.
I had heard of this--this great wound in the ocean that had opened from the quake. The satellite pictures had shown it, a gaping maw the newscasters were already naming "the Abyss". Geology was not my speciality, but it seemed so strange somehow that it should be glowing--when all initial reports from the seismographers that it wasn't--no, couldn't--extend as deep as the molten mantle. If it had, the sea would have boiled, and all of us would have been parboiled in our beds...
Always the fool, I put this thought aside and found my way down the cliffs, nearly ending my own life in several foolish missteps. When I made it to the beach, my fear had all but wrung the foolishness out of me.
The beach was desolate, much as I had expected it to be. The earthquake had killed or frightened off anything that once lived there, so I waded down a shoreline decorated with the corpses of fish and birds and seals... The stench was incredible.
I came upon a place where that gash in the earth nearly met the beach. I moved close, only to find the tide coming in and filling several pools of water that had formed in the tumult. There was--or so I thought--something floating in one of them, something that looked much like a string of frog's eggs. It proved to be much like a wrack of frogspawn on closer investigation--and as far as I could tell by visual inspection alone, they were vital! Though how such a thing could have survived the quake, I don't know--life is wonderful indeed!
I had with me a plastic cup, forgotten in my hand from dinner, and I used it to collect the little eggs with some of the sea water they'd been in, and bring them back to the Institute. Though most of my lab was still a war zone, I installed them in a leftover tank that had somehow survived the quake, filled it with saltwater, and forgot about them.
When I came down two days later, I found the most curious thing swimming in the tank...
