Excerpt: Origins

There are only three ways you get to feel like God.

The first is when you learn to control the space-time continuum. The second is when you're holding a M40A3 tactical rifle, staring through the scope at a Spinosaurus, picking out the exact moment when it'll die. And the third way to feel like God is when you're dragging your little brother on an anti-gravity sled at Warp Speed 4.6 through the banisters of your grandparents' ship.

I guess I should start off by telling you that this is all my fault. Both incidents. Or maybe I should start at the beginning. Not that you care much about much except for the reason there are Utahraptors loose in, well, Utah, but I think you should know, in case we don't get them under control.

See, when I was 12, my parents died. Yeah, it sucked, but it happens to lots of kids. And there was the bonus of moving in with my grandparents and finding out that my family is in charge of keeping the past in check. The way Grandpa Joe told it, the past is, like, aware. Of itself. Creepy, right? It’s like the Terminator movies, only in real life, and it’s the dinosaurs coming to get you instead of robot assassins. But it’s not the dinosaurs who are doing it. It’s the actual freakin’ past. Apparently, humans are just hurting the planet a bit too much, and the planet’s fighting back by trying to bring back the old days before humans evolved and started killing everything in sight, regardless of whether we needed it to survive. So, while some people are trying to get humans to behave a little better, my family and I are focusing more on the whole the-past-wants-to-eat-us-alive aspect of the situation.