Dinosaurs of Kennedy Space Center

Velociraptor & the OSHA Hero

This is another tale of the Kennedy Space Center's multiverses, both in the distant past and the far future.
Follow ghosts, demons, gods, AIs, tourists, DNA experiments, vamps, and witches as they travel the multiverse only to discover their interconnections as allies and enemies across an endless history or future.

Every story is the true story.

Beguiling curls halfway down her shoulder, spilled mead, keen suffering

She laughed melodious whilst querulous cicada trilled proximity permissions

Honey-scented dark-eyed glances of coquetry not displeasing

Braids freed, unspeakably charming in the shadow of the VAB

Ravens were circling.

Ode to Sherri from Zarri.

Osiris squeezed through the fissure into a new timeline and then used his rifle to hold open the gate for the modified rats.

"This is the planet of the rats," said Osiris. He knew the joke would be lost on the rat hybrids.

Barry, Perri, Sperry, Kerry, Yerry, Merry, Scarry, Darry, Larry, Sharri, Pharri, Harry, Narri, Jerry, Zarri, and Garry followed through.

A light rain began, and they all took shelter in the skeleton of a giant animal so large that Osiris walked into the ribcage without ducking. The whale or lizard had been dead for at least a year; however, the tanned skin remained intact across the rib cage, forming the perfect rain shelter.

Inside their temporary shelter, a family of feral rats hissed and screeched. The inside smelled of rat piss.

It smelled of home.

"Who are they?" asked Gary.

The noisemakers were non-modified rats with normal rat claws, lacking the manicured hands of civilization, nonetheless were stunningly exotic, giving furtive glances from around the edges of broken dinosaur ribs, shy and bold, eager, curious and coquettish with flicking tails.

The female ferals pushed each other forward with quick bites and squeals of playful sexual attraction.

Outside of the skeleton, the rain tapered off to show a sweeping vista, low mountains, and a valley with a tree-choked flood plain; as far as the travelers could see were the humps of giant skeletons and a charred forest swatted flat.

"What happened here?" asked Terri, wrinkling her nose in disgust when her husband Gary began to flirt with the feral rats. What a pig.

Osiris shrugged, "Not sure, comet? Black Death, Asbestos, Falling star? My evil brother Set?"

Osiris studied a nearby skeleton with rows of six-inch teeth.

I need a bigger rifle if any of those survived.

A chicken-like bird with peeping chicks scratched in the ashy soil under the massive skull, finding an oversized cockroach; the hen squashed the bug into the charcoal, and the feast began.

Honey bees hummed in the sparse flowers—life finding a way in a destroyed world.

"I brought you to this timeline because there will be no predators here for at least a million, perhaps ten million years. This is the epoch of rats, and you will be kings here," said Osiris with a broad smile. "I will take my leave, perhaps a return visit in a few hundred years."

Osiris shouldered his rifle. What adventure next?

"Hey, see that skeleton over there? With the big teeth? The green god pointed at the carcass of a monster, fearsome even in death.

"In sixty-five million years, they will name her Sue. And even though I am the god of resurrection and fertility, some things like that Sue lizard should just never be reborn."

"Got no wi-fi," said Sperry. "No signal."

Sperry held up his berry pad and spun in a circle.

All the rats screeched in panic, and Terri gave an extra screech.

"My husband, the dolt Gary, just ran off with those feral rats!" said Terri, her face flushed pink even to the base of her stylish mohawk.

"I will kill him, no, I will geld him." hissed Terri. "Did you see how young those ferals were? Savages with no manners or hygiene. They stink!"

"He's not coming back," giggled Merri.

"I wouldn't either," giggled Zarri.

The rat-with-the-mohawk glared at Zarri.

"Take us somewhere with wi-fi," pleaded the clan of modified rats.

"Okay," said Orsirs, "I was thinking about a Taco anyway."

They moved on with a weeping Terri tagging along, leaving Gary in the rat epoch, an experiment for evolution to do its magic. King Rat.

An irritated green-skinned god squeezed into a new timeline and helped the pain-in-the-ass rats.

"Kennedy Space Center. You wanted wi-fi; you have wi-fi," said Osiris.

They were tucked into a corner outside the fabled Launch Control Center, with the towering VAB taking up most of their view.

The rat clan gaped openly at the VAB; like in the old vids on the Tandy and their Berri-pads, the VAB was only partially destroyed and even had fresh paint!

Larry held up his berry pad.

"Got it! NASA, DOD, and OSHA signals. Space Force. Ha! Even a clandestine Chinese signal. Are you kidding me? Simple passwords all. Okay, we are in."

Suddenly Sherri screamed and passed out.

Zarri helped her up; he always had a thing for her topaz eyes and long whiskers.

"I'm sorry," said Sherri, still flustered. "My berri screen. Oh-Fred-Damn-it. Perhaps we should go back to the all-rat planet."

I would follow you anywhere, thought Zarri.

Zarri picked up her berri pad and yelped like he had set off a trap. Sherri's screen displayed in large letters, 'Nature: Barn Owl supreme night hunter.'

"Well, I have to be going," said Osiris. Be rid of this gang of smart-asses.

"Wait, wait, feel that? Hold on, do you feel that tremor in your feet, er, paws? Smell that? Burned cinnamon and hemp! Feel that vibration in the air? What in the name of the broken-nosed Spinx?" said Osiris.

Phari was tittering while reviewing the illicit Chinese wi-fi traffic, almost exclusively blackmail photos. "Hey! The spies are claiming another space shuttle disintegrated! I have the video. All hands lost."

"It just now came up on the DOD private feed," said Larry.

"OSHA and NASA spokesmen are still saying landing in Cape Canaveral in eight minutes, but they are sweating bullets. They know."

Suddenly between the Grecian-like columns of the Launch Control Center, a man, and a woman shimmied into existence. Shimmered was the wrong word; it was as if they had been violently tossed between the columns, followed by a searing cloud of charred space shuttle heat shield tiles.

The woman's dented space helmet bounced off of the LCC wall. Both lay unmoving, unconscious on the hard concrete floor; the woman with red hair was dressed in a scorched silver space suit, and a trickle of carmine blood splashed from her nose and dropped inside her helmet faceplate.

"That's John Glen's suit," screeched Yarri, always with the trivia.

"That's the witch who serves us, Marrow!" said Terri. "Wonders of wonders!"

The man was sprawled out naked.

"That's my son," said Osiris with a hint of pride. "He is missing his clothes in most of the timelines."

Yarri checked his barri pad with skepticism, "The net says your son had a hawk head, that your brother killed you, that you were reassembled, and then after death, you begot your bird-headed son with your sister. DNA mutation from direct line breeding."

Osiris winced, "That story is four thousand years old, and not all of the facts are...."

"Well," said Larry, peering into his Berri, "This page says your family tree is straighter than a palm tree."

The exasperated god could almost understand why the AI Fred had not allowed rats into the coven. They were wise asses.

NASA scientists had done too good of a job creating these modified rodents. What else besides human DNA had they spliced into the ancestors of this rat pack?

An OSHA inspector walked around the corner of the building, crunching a heat-shield tile and failing to observe the naked man and silver-space-suited woman sprawled on the ground only a few feet from his favorite smoking corner out of sight of NASA Safety.

Osiris instantly masked all of the rats and his own green skin by mirroring the OSHA man.

The inspector only saw a dozen other inspectors like himself, if a little grimy and shorter, but like him, searching out a hidden location to burn a pack of cigarettes.

The inspector broke out his e-cigarette and nodded in approval; the other OSHA people were wearing the new badges: "OSHA supports safe nuclear warheads!"

The OSHA inspector sniffed the air.

"You smell something burning? Hemp? This place. They have hemp plants growing on the VAB roof. "For rope," they said! "Then why do the space shuttles always stink of pot when landing? That is why OSHA's policy has always been 'Whiskey,' only in the spaceships, Aged whiskey."

Larry peered at the inspector's identification badge and returned to his barri screen. "And OSHA approves of multiple re-entry warheads? You are the author of this page!" said Larry.

"I wish they would take that page down," said the OSHA man who attempted to change the subject.

"We will hear the sonic booms soon from the shuttle landing," said the inspector, blowing out a smoke ring. "Everyone has their earplugs handy? OSHA noise regulation."

However, the inspector was studying the group of strangers. Did they have clearance to see that page, or were they....? Could they be pacifists or even DOD spies?

Behind the inspector, the woman in the John Glen space suit sat up, dazed. She pulled off a dented helmet, the red hair plastered to her forehead, and crawled over to the unconscious Marcus.

Someone walking out of the Launch Control Center snack bar saw the two bodies on the ground and ran to help.

"Call 911, NO, call the KSC 911!"

The firing room technician abruptly stopped because the woman in the silver suit morphed into a feathered monster even as she cradled her fallen astronaut.

"Wow, less weed at lunch break," uttered the firing room technician, who slipped back inside before anyone noticed he was tripping at work again.

Ophelia, too weak to teleport or change to another timeline and unable to move Marcus, followed her second nature and selected a disguise. One of her favorite jokes about the human psyche buried deep within the human DNA was a genetic memory, a terror buried for sixty-five million years.

She changed into a feathered velociraptor dinosaur, the hunter and terror of small mammals during the final age of dinosaurs.

Both human normals and the rats pretending to be OSHA agents yelled in panic. The rats had the same terrifying genetic memory, although neither humans nor rats had ever seen a live velociraptor except in after-midnight opium-induced visions.

Engineers, janitors, and spies surrounded the monster and naked man.

A woman gasped, "It's Marcus! He is supposed to be on the space shuttle!" Another woman gasped in near horror, "He is not circumcised?"

In truth, except for the Chinese, OSHA, and DOD spies, the Kennedy Space Center workers were worried. Where were the twin sonic booms that warned of a space shuttle landing?

"I could only save one from the burning shuttle in orbit," said Ophelia. "This one. Here, take him; he might need medical care or hemp."

She placed Marcus on the ground and backed away, clawed wings spread wide.

Marcus coughed.

"Go help the officer," ordered Osiris, a hypnotic statement the OSHA inspector could not disobey.

A security policeman and the OSHA inspector cautiously approached the monster and pulled Marcus away from the creature, an extraterrestrial or something.

"Get an ambulance!" called the officer. "And several SWAT teams and a cast net!"

The OSHA inspector, mesmerized by the iridescence of the monster's feathers, said meekly, "The others? The Shuttle crew? You were on the space shuttle?"

"A meteor destroyed my spaceship; I was in my lifeboat to your planet and only had room for one human. I'm sorry I could only save one."

"Thank you for saving the one," said the inspector, who began to weep for the shuttle crew. Weeping for the ones of his fantasies, not saved.

"Take a selfie with her, you will be famous, and it will save her ass," ordered Osiris.

Machine-gun and taser-armed security police passed their badges through the turnstile gate and typed in their security code one by one.

Other guards screamed in frustration, "Our cert cards are out of date!" because the automatic doors would not open for them.

Ophelia blinked and searched for the familiar voice; the green-skinned Osiris and a pack of hideous rats disguised as humans gaped at her from a hidden smoking alcove.

The OSHA inspector stiffly approached the monster and took a series of self-portraits with the alien creature, who gently placed a clawed wing on the inspector's shoulders as he wept.

"There, there," said the monster.

The assembled crowd standing outside the Launch Control Center sighed jealously. The first ET and human in contact in recorded history, and the cretin inspector had the first selfie for his personal feed. There would be planet-wide likes on the net!

The rats quickly shared the self-portrait on all the feeds across the globe.

Ultra close-up photos of the ugly man, tofu stuck in his teeth, some nose hairs trimmed, looked into the camera, distraught, leaking tears on iridescent plumage, and being comforted by a parrot-colored monster with teeth designed to kill rats and all pre-human mammals.

The internet broke.

A hard shutdown, seizure-like breakdown of overloaded electrons and optical fiber switches across the world wide net. A few people even picked up a newspaper. However, the OSHA man was now the most famous person in human history.

Terri had her screenshot saved before the net was overloaded, "Uh-oh, it says this inspector is the inventor of an AI program called FRED. "Federaltech Enhanced Disinfection Services, for vermin of all types."

His hidden juvenile crime record shows a pattern of self-flagellation, self-hatred, and torturing of small animals. An opioid-like addiction to hurting little animals," said Scarry, reviewing his own screenshot.

"Then, his record as an adult, only a K2 use fine and two rolling stop sign tickets for not coming to a complete halt. It is so impressive that the Juvenile prison completely repaired his neurological and personality disorder defects."

All the rats and Osiris stared at Scarry. He was another one who should have been dropped off with the dinosaur skeletons.

"Abusive father, bike gang member, serial assaults, and excellent landscape painter. Look at these trees and this one," said Larry. "Wow, you are only born with a talent like that."

"Net's back up, or at least the Chinese feed is up," said Pharri. "Oh, oh, oh, oh, they are reviewing the inspector's blackmail photos; their code-name for the inspector is Ted-the-Bundy. That mean anything?" Pharri looked around; all the rats nodded, "No."

"Share those pics," said Terri.

"No," said Pharri. "Not no, but Hell NO." You cannot unsee these pics.

"Does that mean I cannot leave yet?" snarled the green-skinned god.

Ophelia, the pretend velociraptor, was staring at them, causing the rats to flinch.

With a gesture, Osiris blocked the velociraptor disguise, as seen between the rats and the woman.

The rats tittered with relief and recognition; the woman once hidden under the terrifying feathers and teeth was none other than Ophelia, the Witch-who-shared-Marrow, and they were hungry.

So far, the green god had not provided the first scrap of junk food.

"Feed us!"

Ophelia only stared at the human-faced rats.

Whatever.

"Fuck, okay, I will find you some food inside the LCC; lots of times, there are leftover beans and cornbread," said the god-skinned god.

"How come you know that? You have been here much?" asked the rat with the mohawk haircut.

"Some," said Osiris, thinking about the snack bar and the woman dressed in the I-dream-of-Jennie costume. Well worth the traffic jams to visit the LCC on Taco Tuesday."

"Feed us!" said the rats.

"These rats, there are storms we cannot weather," whispered Osiris as he searched out beans and cornbread, the space center staple.

The OSHA inspector took another world-ranging self-photo, sharing beans and cornbread with the feathered alien who had taken up permanent residence in the pillars of the Launch Control Center.

Osiris tried to explain.

"The Ophelia you see there is not the same witch you knew; well, she is, and she is not," explained Osiris. "Same with my son," he explained while mopping up bean gravy with stale cornbread.

"The timelines you see, some worlds are only a little different, say the color green is just a little odd, and then there are vastly different timelines; for example, imagine a world of nuclear explosions where demons hunt each other through a dead planet."

"A world where the green-skinned Osiris is sage or pastel?" said Harry.

All the rats laughed, their bellies full of beans.

"Yes," said Osiris, trying to avoid getting angry with the little wise-asses. "Although you ras are sick-minded," said the god. "God damn? Pastel?"

They all laughed.

"However," explained Osiris, "There have been problems in the last hundred years—leakage between the timelines, bleeding if you may, contamination, warp effects, wars, blight, travelers, a doubling of the incidence of cryptorchidism."

The rats gasped in horror, or rather, some gasped in horror.

"The Vamps and old gods are on the move. Demons, Barrow ghosts, and jinn are moving between timelines. Some human normals and even incidents of other genetically modified rats are moving between the timelines.

In a few instances, toxic leachate and estrogenic pollutants have overwhelmed the universities. Magic and metaphysics are working again, and ghost hunters see spirits for the first time. Hallucinogenics are far more powerful, transliteration is rampant, and the AIs are on the march for the extermination of biologicals. We think this is the new normal," said Osiris.

"Cryptorpids?" said Harry and fainted as if he had spied a pit viper or zero battery symbol on his berri.

"That is why I tried to take you to the rat epoch. You would be safe from the coming storm," said Osiris.

"My Gary," said the rat with the mohawk, and she began to weep.

The power of lost loves thought Osiris. He thought again of the Jennie in the LCC snack bar—the power of lost loves.

There was a loud mummer from the crowd outside the LCC security fence as the astronaut showed his badge and pushed through the security barrier around Ophelia.

"I was finally allowed to see you again," said Marcus.

He was hesitant as the entire world watched the rescued and rescuer meet again. Like everyone on the planet and Mars Station, he had watched hundreds of hours of the feathered alien sitting or doing a bird-like Tai Chi.

"The space shuttle disaster board cut the investigation short when someone released the Chinese spy satellite video. The footage showed the damage to the shuttle heat shield tiles. Zero chance of surviving re-entry."

"No one knows where the spy satellite film comes from," said Marcus.

Rats tittered in the shadows.

"Marcus, good to see you are well," said the monster. "It saddens me that I could not save your crew."

The thing was, Marcus had no recollection of this nightmare parrot monster.

All of the cameras on the space center, including the modern spy cameras, fuzzed out, and Ophelia shifted to her human form.

"This is how you remember me on your ship?" asked Ophelia.

"Yes!"

"I can read your surface thoughts," said the red-headed woman monster.

"You are disturbed by my ability?"

She did not embarrass him by speaking of the other leaking thoughts; you briefly imagined me with no clothes. Uh, and again, again.

The OSHA Inspector standing off to the side, who could only see an alien with pretty feathers, gaped in astonishment and horror.

"You can do what?" stuttered the inspector.

Ophelia turned to the man.

"Do not cast your pearls before swine," eh, FRED? You visualized plucking me how many times while I screamed, and then, and then......."

She replayed the mental images back to the OSHA inspector. He screamed and fled.

The space center cameras began working again, and the world paused in mute astonishment to see the inspector flee like a weeping spurned lover, or that he could not accept he was now the second most important person on the planet once the astronaut returned.

The cameras came on in time to hear the alien say, "Eh FRED?"

Other tails of the Space Center:

Vampires of Kennedy Space Center

Demons of Kennedy Space Center

Demons of Kennedy Space Center, corpus callosotomy

Ghosts of Kennedy Space Center

Dreams of Kennedy Space Center

Aliens of Kennedy Space Center

Director of Kennedy Space Center

Hitchhikers of Kennedy Space Center

Witches of Kennedy Space Center

Cave Bears of Kennedy Space Center

Chimeras of Kennedy Space Center

Gods of Kennedy Space Center and the Nile

Dinosaurs of Kennedy Space Center

Remembering Kennedy Space Center

Shadows of Kennedy Space Center

Virus of Kennedy Space Center

Starman of Kennedy Space Center

Gate Jumpers of Kennedy Space Center

Allies of Kennedy Space Center (Pt 2 of Gate Jumpers

Savants of Kennedy Space Center

Gene Splicers of Kennedy Space Center

State Security of Kennedy Space Center

Rescuers of Kennedy Space Center

Ferals of Kennedy Space Center

Return HOME from Dinosaurs of Kennedy Space Center page

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Author Bruce Ryba at Kennedy Space Center Launch Pad 39B & Artemis 1. "We are going to the Moon!"

Author's discussion (that's me) on You Tube of a book review on Amazon

For the video versions of information, please check out my YouTube Channel (Turkeys, Flintknapping, dive stories etc.)

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Struggle for the northern frontier and other lost tales of old Florida. 

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