Chapter 4: The Hologram Creates the Quetzalcoatlus

Claude and I bonded for a good ten minutes. It was nice to have man's best friend next to me, but eventually, I had to get back to work. I finished cleaning my room, but that was not the end. To celebrate getting it done, I had to mow the lawn next. Goodness, I would never get my birthday present. Wait, did I care about a little birthday present? Yeah. Dad just always forgot to get me one, since he was always so busy. It was a first for him and a first for me.

Though a bit agitated, I marched down to the garage, but I found that Dada had locked it. The lawnmower was in the front yard, instead. Weird. Dada never put the lawnmower out. Something fishy was going on. Oh, whatever. I went ahead and started, even though storm clouds had built up on the horizon.

Halfway through mowing the lawn, the mailman came by in his floating car. His name was Ernest, and he was good friends with Dada. Since I was already out there, I decided to meet him.

Ernest was a slightly plump man who wore a pair of high-tech glasses. With one touch of a button, he could literally summon a holographic screen that had the whole neighborhood's population on it. Mailmen used those glasses to make sure everybody got what they needed.

Claude followed me outside, but he merely rolled around on the warm driveway. Therefore, I could not have my dog with me to greet Ernest.

I nodded at him. "Hello, Ernest."

"Daniel Matton! What a pleasure it is to see you!" Ernest was very excited, and I had no idea why. There was obviously something on his mind. He rolled out of his car, literally rolled out of it, but he quickly stood up. "Oh, Dan, I'm so proud of you!" Without warning, Ernest picked me up and pulled me into a tight hug.

"Ernest, what is your problem?" I choked out.

"Oh, sorry. I'm just super excited!" Ernest put me down, and that allowed me to rub my arm.

"I can see that," I admitted. "What happened? Did you find another wife?"

"No, something even better!" Ernest placed his hands on his hips, and he started to tap dance. He threw his arms into the sky. "The PPMC Project is complete!"

At the time, I had no idea what the PPMC was. To me, Ernest spoke gibberish. "What are you talking about?" I asked.

"Maybe you'll get to see that Quetzalcoatlus after all!" Ernest totally ignored me. He tapped the button on his glasses. At his command, a holographic screen appeared between us. It showed us a list of names for everyone who lived in Chanticleer.

Ernest scrolled down to the M section, and he tapped Matton household. The holographic screen flashed and then faded away. It grew smaller and smaller until poof. A cluster of envelopes appeared in midair.

I grabbed the mail from the sky. There were four envelopes, but one of them was manila and quite heavy. I almost dropped it, but I caught it right in time. Glancing at it, I saw it was from the Downtown Greenville Space Center–from someone named Professor Chenoa Birmingham.

Ernest, still excited, said, "There you go, kid! Oh, I can't wait!"

"Can't wait for what?" I was severely confused.

Ernest finally just lost himself to his excitement. He snatched my shoulders and shook me like a rag doll. "You are the star of the PPMC Project!" he yelled.

***

"What's the PPMC?" I asked Dada later. I had just come in from mowing the lawn. It stormed like crazy outside. The wind howled, and the rain sounded like hail pelting a car roof. I found Dada in his library. He was reading about black holes in holographic books and academic journals.

Instantly, he stopped what he was doing and said, "What are you talking about, Dan?"

I held the mail out to him and explained, "Ernest scared me today. He said something called the PPMC Project has been completed, and that I'm the star of it."

"Nonsense." Dada took the envelopes out of my hand. He started to flip through them, but he stopped dead on his tracks when he reached the manila envelope.

Geico, who was in the library with us, was also curious. He rolled over to Dada and me and stretched his neck. Yes, his creators programmed him to do that. Along with Dada, he examined the manila envelope. "Master! That's from Professor Chenoa!"

"I know who it's from! Ah!"

"Who's Professor Chenoa?" I wanted to know. There was something suspicious going on, and I was desperate to find out what. What was Dad hiding from me?

He glanced at me. "Oh, you're still here."

That offended me. "Of course, I am! I'm your son, and I want to know what's going on!"

"This is none of your business, Daniel. It's between me and the space center. Shoo. Leave me to work."

"But Ernest said that I'm the star!"

"Ernest probably had one too many brandies. Now shoo before I lose my temper!"

One thing for sure, Dad was always a very good actor. On my way out the library, I heard him cheer behind me.

"Yes! It's finished! It's finally finished! Quick, Geico! We need to listen to Chenoa's message!"

I wanted to stay behind and eavesdrop, but Geico ended up shutting the two-hundred pound door to the library. It looked like a giant vault. Geico knew me all too well.

I went back to my room and saw that Dada had returned my laptop. He must have checked my room when I was out mowing.

Snickering, I picked up my laptop and carried it to the center of my quarters. I pressed a green button on the top right corner of the keyboard. Right when I did, the holographic screen of my computer appeared over the keyboard. Next, I touched the button for the World Wide Web and put my computer on the floor.

The screen expanded to ten times its size. It was as if the whole galaxy had unfolded in front of me. My whole room, now covered in a holographic image of the World Wide Web, made it quite decorative. Icons of websites were all around me. There was the weather site, the paleontology site, and ah-ha! There we go. Google. The icon was in front of my window.

Getting down on the floor, I turned my laptop's keyboard, so that it faced the Google search box, and typed in The PPMC Project.

Enter.

Boom!

Hundreds of articles concerning the PPMC surrounded me, but none of them had the information I was looking for. They did not say what the PPMC Project was, just: "The PPMC Project is finally finished in Greenville, South Carolina." That was for every single article. My assumption was it was new, so there was not yet too much information on it. I had to find a way to extract it from Dada. After all, he worked at the space center.

Sighing, I shut off my computer. The hologram vanished from my room. Everything was back to normal, or was it? It did not feel normal. In fact, it felt like my life was going to change very soon. Oh, Mother, I really need you.

***

I had a terrifyingly weird dream that night. Opening my eyes, I found that I hung upside-down from an enormous, winged creature. It looked like... No, it couldn't be. It was a Quetzalcoatlus. I was sure of it.

Clouds of dust and smoke blocked out the Sun. The Quetzalcoatlus floated over a Mars-like landscape that looked like the first supercontinent, Rodinia. I never got a good look at her because she dropped me onto the ground and opened her wings. She started to fly away, but I yelled at her.

"Wait! Where are you going? Come back! I can't fly!"

The Quetzalcoatlus took a moment to pause and peer back at me, but then she flew off again.

Frustrated, I stomped my foot. Under it, the ground started to shake. I jumped when I heard an intimidating roar behind me. I looked over my right shoulder pad and broke down in sweat at what I saw–a thirty-foot tall T-Rex. It waved its scrawny arms and roared in my face. T-Rex spit sprayed all over it.

"Mate, why are you so angry?" I nervously asked it. "Come on, it's 5022."

The T-Rex was having none of that. It stomped towards me but stopped when another prehistoric creature stepped into the scene–a Temnospondyli. It's a distant relative of amphibians.

Petrified, I backed up from each prehistoric animal. "What? The? Heck?" I asked.

Before the animals could attack one another, a new rock burst up from the ground, and it took the T-Rex with it. Meteors rained down from the atmosphere. The ground under my feet split open. I quickly jumped over to solid land, only to witness a saber-toothed cat and woolly mammoth running from the disaster. What in the name of space-heck was happening?

I heard something from the sky. It was engine of some sort. A blurry starship flew towards me, but then it suddenly took on the form of the Quetzalcoatlus. Seriously? What kind of sorcery was this?

The Quetzalcoatlus soared down to me. She picked me up with her beak and lifted me into the sky, tossing me onto her head. Yelping, I grabbed her crest. She wanted to get above the clouds, but she wasn't able to because a sudden ball of flaming rock broke through them. It dropped towards us.

"No! No! No!" I begged, but the rock only fell quicker and hotter.

***

"Ahh!" I screamed. My eyes snapped open, and I shot up in bed. I was home. I was back in 5022, and the time was three in the morning. The storm had subsided, but the dream was fresh in my brain. With sweat trickling down my temples, I took deep breaths. "Aw man, what the heck?" I asked, clutching my head with both hands.

What was that? That dream was literally a combination of all the geologic time periods in Earth's history: the Precambrian Time, the Paleozoic Era, the Mesozoic Era, and the early Cenozoic Era. At that moment, something crossed my mind. The Precambrian Time, the Paleozoic Era, the Mesozoic Era, and the early Cenozoic Era. PPMC.

"Does the PPMC Project have to do with geologic time?"

I asked that question to myself on that very strange night–the night of my seventeenth birthday.