Chapter 170: Thoughts of a prisoner (part 2)

Words : 1498 Updated : Sep 29th, 2025

Abe hadn't slept for even a second that night. He was used to sleeping in the worst places and on the hardest surfaces, but he couldn't relax with all the anxiety he had. His survival instinct, hardened to the max by his soldier training, kept his senses alert to detect even the slightest threat. Despite having spent a sleepless night, however, he didn't feel the slightest tiredness; probably all the adrenaline he had in his body was charging him as if it were a battery. He wondered how Jackson would react knowing what had happened. He hoped he didn't go crazy and do something extremely stupid. In his mind, his friend and brother bravely (and very foolishly) rushed to Cartago to save him, challenging hundreds of dinosaurs alone. Abe tried to convince himself that this would never happen, but in his heart he knew that was something Jackson would do. Abe unfortunately had no way to contact him and tell him to not do anything that could kill him. He couldn't even let him know that he was fine. He hoped that Jocelyne or her father could hold him back. However, he also had to worry about himself. The dinosaurs weren't bad and they didn't hurt the humans, as they promised... but he didn't know what they were going to do with them. Since they hadn't provided him with mattresses, Abe could say they didn't have much regard for human needs... or maybe they just ignored the use of mattresses. He looked at Ellie and Alexander, who had stayed with him the whole time. The boy had spent the night wandering around the square where they had been locked up, hoping to find his father, but in vain. They didn't know where Malcolm had ended up. The trio knew he was probably in some other enclosure, but they had no way of verifying it. They could only stand still and wait. Abe knew only one thing for certainty: he absolutely didn't have to give to the dinosaurs a reason to get mad at the humans. From what he understood from their expressions, they already seemed angry enough with them and probably only the orders of their 'pack leader' stopped them to do something bad. However, Abe was sure that if humans tried to escape or started freaking out, the dinosaurs would not save themselves from taking 'drastic measures', and sadly he also knew that there was another chance that humans would they behaved like this. So he promised himself to act as a mediator in case a conflict ever emerged. It was risky, but maybe that way he could save some lives. Also, if the dinosaurs would determine that he could be useful to them, maybe they would start treating him more carefully and he could discover what happened to Malcolm, or maybe he could even have a chance to discover something about their plans. Around noon something finally changed. A huge diplodocus entered the enclosure dragging a truck full of food, followed by a coritosaurus. "All lined up! It's time for lunch!" the hadrosaurid loudly declared. Abe hastened to be among the first; in his experience, late prisoners received the worst food. To his surprise, however, the dinosaurs were not stingy: on the contrary, they gave them enough food to feed them for days. When Alexander's turn came, however, the boy found an opinion: "Sorry, can we cook the meat?" Abe turned angry and worried towards Alexander, ready to tell him to shut up and apologize to the dinosaurs for his behavior, but the coritosaurus preceded him: "What does 'cook' mean?" he asked curiously. A murmur spread among the humans. Most of them had thought that the dinosaurs were giving them uncooked food out of spite, but after the words of the corytosaurus they began to think they were wrong. "Don't you cook the meat?" Alexander asked in amazement. "If we did, he wouldn't have asked you" replied the diplodocus, who seemed very interested in the conversation. "Could you explain to us?" "Ok..." Alexander certainly did not expect the conversation to take such a turn. "Well, you have to light a fire and..." The diplodocus stirred and let out a roar, and hardly tripped over his own feet; people hurried away fearing that the sauropod would slip and fall on him. "Are you crazy perhaps?" asked the coritosaurus, who unlike his companion had managed to contain himself, but who still showed fear in his eyes. "What fool would willingly create such a destructive and dangerous thing?" Abe was amazed. Didn't dinosaurs use fire? So how had they created their shields? Most of human technology was based on thermal energy. Could it be that the dinosaurs possessed another type of technology? After all, fire wasn't the only existing heat source. If amplified enough, for example, the sun's rays could melt metal. Or a sufficient amount of electrical discharges could generate a temperature so high that anything could vaporize. And then there were other forms of energy, such as kinetics... Abe realized he had made a giant mistake: for all this time, he had been trying to predict the actions of dinosaurs as if they thought like humans. But the dinosaurs weren't humans. Their brains were completely dissimilar. They had therefore evolved their own technology, their own social system, their own law... even concepts such as morality or logic could be completely different from how humans thought them. In the course of humans' History, morality had never been fixed. For some, saving an opponent was a matter of honor, for others of cowardice. For some domination was good, for others bad. But the dinosaurs could have been different from all of that. They were literally an alien civilization! Abe realized that before he could engage in dialogue with them he first had to study them and try to understand their behavior. Otherwise the dinosaurs could have misunderstood his intentions and took what was an act of conciliation for him as an insult. Now, however, he had to worry about Alexander, who after the dinosaurs' reaction seemed unable to continue: "Well... yes. In short... the fire is lit and used to heat the meat..." "If this is what 'cook' means, then absolutely not. You can't do that" the coritosaurus replied. "We don't want to see this city burn" Even though Sobek had mastered fire, and the dinosaurs admired him for it, they still feared it. They were willing to use flamethrowers, but only because they trusted their pack leader, and even then they shivered like leaves as soon as the blaze started. Sobek therefore had quickly eliminated the flamethrowers from his own army: after all, he could have far more powerful weapons. Sobek never intended to change the dinosaurs' perspective on fire. After all, they didn't need to cook the food, because the food provided by the [Food system] was free of parasites and disease; and they didn't need it to defend or warm up, because they were already extremely powerful of them and the temperature in the forest rarely dropped below fifteen degrees. In addition, the dinosaurs were covered in feathers that warmed them. Indeed, enticing dinosaurs to use fire would have been counterproductive: on Eden, where the amount of oxygen was much higher than that of Earth, carelessly using fire inside a forest could trigger a fire of great proportions in a few minutes. continental from which it would have been almost impossible to escape. On Earth, fires could move at insane speeds if favored by the wind and reach temperatures that melt aluminum, but on Eden, with all that extra oxygen and a lot of wood as fuel, the flames could have moved faster than a t-rex and achieve sufficient heat to melt the silver. A single mistake in the use of fire could have unleashed a firestorm so devastating it could level entire acres of forest to the ground; [Reinforced skin] could protect the dinosaurs from shocks and give them more heat resistance, but it couldn't protect them from such high temperatures. After taking into account all these variables, Sobek agreed that the best thing was not to change the idea that the dinosaurs had of fire. Also because changing millions of years of solid beliefs would have been a titanic undertaking. Upon receiving his response, Alexander dared not object and hurried to join Abe, followed shortly after by Ellie. The food distribution went smoothly and no one asked any further questions. However, Abe felt he had gotten a lot out of that dialogue. He had realized that he was facing a civilization with completely different thoughts, mentality, morals and technologies from any other in human History. Despite the situation, he found he was a little excited. In all likelihood, the next few days would be a continuous discovery.

Chapter 170: Thoughts of a prisoner (part 2)

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