The boar pulled them backward through time.
Susan felt the figurine's influence the moment ARCHIE engaged navigation—a directional bias, a current that wanted to flow toward continental deposits, toward land, toward the deep Mesozoic.
"Passing Pleistocene baseline," ARCHIE announced. "Miocene. Oligocene. Eocene threshold."
The XR Lab rendered the descent as movement through layered space. Susan stood on her locomotion platform in Building 258, haptic suit registering temperature shifts, texture changes. Three hundred meters away, Starseed and Jennifer sat in their paired chairs, the actual interface happening through their entangled consciousness.
"Cretaceous boundary approaching. Target depth: 70 million years before present. Late Maastrichtian."
"Four million years before the impact," David said from the platform beside her.
"We're not here to witness extinction," Margaret said. "We're here to see what lived."
The world assembled itself from data.
First the sky—deeper blue than any modern atmosphere, the light carrying frequencies Susan's eyes interpreted as almost purple at the edges. Then the horizon—cycads and conifers, flowering plants still finding their ecological niches. Temperature: warm, humid, the greenhouse climate of a world without ice caps.
"Navigation stable," Starseed's voice came through, distant and present simultaneously. "This is what the boar wanted to show us."
Susan stepped forward. The platform translated …
