The Reptilian Gambit

It was definitely not the way things were supposed to be done, but we did it, and all promised to never speak about it again.

The end doesn't always justify the means, but we would all be dead. Not the alternative we wanted...

Death is the meanest of ends indeed, so we justified the mad methods we employed to survive. Wrangling dinosaurs isn’t easy or fun, and it wreaks havoc with the local timelines. But we’ve seen the worlds where humans are the apex predators and we want to avoid that for ours.

Slowly, over 11 generations, we moved enough dinosaurs from before the meteor crash to a few thousand years after. They quickly filled every ecological niche. The mammals again stayed in the shadows. Humanity would never evolve and spoil the world. We'd done it! But at what cost?

We scanned the skies. The stars blinked twice—confirmation. They’d received our final transmission. Out there, the architects of this rerouted Earth were watching, analyzing. An experiment. The meteor was their variable. Now they’d see what happened when we changed the equation.