h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ha ha! We did *not* change history! We saved those animals all along ... you'll see if you go back, you'll see we are there, and we are saving them, it always was what happened, nothing got changed. Anyways, the story itself doesn't speak of the saving of the animals, so there!

Prime directive ... *watching* is already interfering (quantum mechanics ... Heisenberg's uncertainty principle ... Schroedinger's cat ... et cetra). We managed to contrive a system of splitting of realities into additional strands, *allowing* the interaction of strands that would be distantly separated under normal spacetime conditions. This allows us to *get involved* as much as we want, without changing actual history. But generally we stay away from messing up things, especially where *human* history is concerned. The reason is of course that humans get more traumatically confused by inexplicable happenings than animals do. Billions of animals have seen our Time Zep, so far, but none of them needed psychotherapy to get over the shock!

In our time trips, we are collecting DNA and, occasionally, samples of individual animals and plants. We rescued the animals from the flood basically, because we *could*, and we thought it would be a nice thing to do for them, but also, they contributed to the DNA pool of our orbiting zoos. We've representations there of all significant periods in evolutionary history. We've a special satellite up there now representing the Mediterranean Basin before the Zanclean flood, and the animals we got are living happily!

Aha! Misuse of temporal mechanics, plus Zweckentfremdung of the Heisenberg Converters....

Nobody who answered this challenge stuck by the conceit of the 'rules' - but nobody really *had* to, there are no fiction cops. People went beyond the original idea, which was way cool.

I just feel that I am allowed to make mock... It's my job.

I enjoyed the story.

I think next time, I'll write an even weirder set of parameters for a challenge, just to see what everybody writes instead of what I suggested...

I love HooToo writers.

What would have been grand if we could have felt the place viscerally.
A waterfall that massive would surely have some effect on a living being's body for example. If you gained the readers attention by making the characters more personable - you could get them to swallow all the factoids easily. A spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down. Just my .

Sorry, my bad I did enjoy your story Willem. The Med has a very strange geological history even without Atlantis!

Hello Elektra! You're absolutely right, but it was difficult as heck within the 1000 words constraints to flesh out the characters *or* to tell more about our subjective reactions to the spectacle! It was as much as I could do, just to cram the relevant and pertinent 'factoids' in. Maybe I should have paid as much regard to the word limit as to the Prime Directive ...