ID 351842023 @ Eduard Goricev | Dreamstime.com
“Anything new about the monkeys?” BigMouth asked.
BoneTeeth snapped his snout in annoyance. “They are primates. And not since last shift. The Joint Monitors report they have begun to build shelters.”
“But that was ninety-five years ago. It is about time for them to wake up again and check. And since they don’t let me have permission for the graviton unless it is an emergency, I was hoping you might have had something with the shift-start download.”
“I don’t. And it takes much longer than a hundred years to go from reed shelters to space flight.”
“Just didn’t want to go to sleep in murky waters,” the junior worker griped.
Pacing the room, his long leathered tail whipping back and forth behind him, BoneTeeth checked each of the stations BigMouth and his two subservant plovers had been manning for the last shift. The oxygen levels continued to creep up in the lower portions of the atmosphere. The magnetic poles had switched again about three years ago. They would need to get that stabilized before transferring any migratory creatures from the monkey-world, ugh, BigMouth had him doing it, the Potential-14 world. The water algae seemed to match the Potential world of about two thousand eight hundred million years ago. It was nearly time to start thinking about land fungi. He would need to bounce that off of the Planners.
The Birds had done what they could, finding all the Potential worlds on their own while waiting for the Crocabillies and the Scorps to jump offworld and settle the first of the Shells the Tortoises left specifically for them so very long ago. But the Birds just were not lizard-brained enough to ruthlessly push the agendas in the Notes to make the worlds livable for Potential species. They tried to make the modified planetoids viable, those rocks that survived the long time since the Tortoises extinction and stabilized into something that could be turned into Shells, but the Birds flitted around with their short lives and need to explore and just couldn’t concentrate on making the Shells work as habitable planets.
Seventeen Potentials: three lost when their homeworlds ecologies failed from solar flares or asteroids; one, the greedy Competitors extinguished before they drained the galaxy swamp of all Potentials, may the Tortoises swim swiftly for their sacrifice; four sentients now spaceworthy together in a community, maybe, and waiting on nine others to see beyond their atmosphere. All one big happy family if the Tortoise Ghosts had anything to say about it, which anyone who swam the river knew would never work. Something always flooded.
The gas planet Whales likely were not going to make it. They reached shelter building before even the Crocabillies according to the Bird records but had not progressed any further in sixty thousand years.
Bone eyed the plovers. Some years he wished his species hadn’t forced-evolved their mutuals into a slave-race. Aside from how the Birds reacted to seeing the fake-sentient species looking so much like their weakest gender, bred to bond and serve one of the Crocabillies for life, he sometimes fell into questioning the ethics of bonding without the possibility of consent as though he was from the Intelligent-is-Choice tide. A very uncomfortable feeling for someone as old and river-bound as him. Other times he wondered if they could use the biological technology to uplift the Potentials quicker, the Spiders notwithstanding. They can stay down there on their homeworld forever.
On the third hand, if he had three hands which he didn’t, he wondered if the Joint Species were even going to make it now that the Threads have managed to lift into space just three shifts ago. The Tortoises thought that planet would evolve toward intelligent trees, not realizing it was the fungal root system developing the intelligence. At least they were triple-star, large red as the primary, limited. How does one even talk to a non-animal? Something to do research on during the boring parts of the shift to see what had been happening while he napped.
In the meantime, he bundled BigMouth off to his hibernation period. After killing and eating Big’s plovers, Bone asked the computer to activate a pair of plovers with genetic dispositions suitable for his personality and needs and settled into his decade-long shift.
(words 715; first published 3/22/2026)
Laying Easter Eggs Series