ACT I, SCENE 1

1840 CE - Long Lagoon, Mt. Spencer, New South Wales, New Holland

The fresh blood spilled during the carnage now sinks into the porous sand under the blaze of a creeping sun, heralding the dawn of a new era. And from Dhagnguu's perspective, this era is going to be an utter nightmare.

The signs of the genocide are strewn all along the parched bank of the evaporating billabong. The decapitated heads of nearly a hundred innocent men, women, and children, their necklace jewelry of shell pendants and eagle claws forced deep into their white-painted foreheads to form a bloody crown of thorns.

What did we do to deserve this?, Dhagnguu as he convulsively sobs, gently stroking the hair of his only child, a seven-year-old girl, now taken away from him. Why? Why her? Why all of them?

Dhagnguu's tribe has not been on good terms with the newcomers. Ranchers have repeatedly accused young men of stealing livestock in the night throughout this unusually long drought. Native wild game, large and small, has become incredibly scarce. The dhagnguu - his Bidjara namesake, which stockmen christened a "lesser bilby" - is just one of numerous indigenous beings in jeopardy since the arrival of the white demons and the ecological disturbance from their alien imports. Strange, ravenous predators that the Gayiri people had never seen: "cats", "dogs", "stoats", "ferrets". Companions of the settlers, whereas larger beasts like "sheep", "cattle", "horses", "donkeys" were either weightlifters or edible deadweight, without agency, without spirit.

These demons do not come from the sky, from the Land of the Dead where most malicious spirits of Dhagnguu's world came. They come from the east, from the sea according to the neighboring coastal tribes, from a land far away called "England". Wherever they went, they don't adapt to the land they are given; they alter it to suit their mode of consumption, with their own plants, their own animals, their own supply of food. A supply plentiful enough for the Gayiri to consider it a means of survival, doubling as a means of retaliation, of resistance, against an enemy already weakened by economic depression as a result of the drought.

This is the cost of that rebellion, right in front of Dhagnguu. The spear-flinging woomeras and bloodwood spears they have relied on for centuries, if not millennia, are not good enough when pitted against rapidly revolving rifles.

Suddenly, Dhagnguu hears footsteps. The kicking of the red dust, the signature of someone running, ready to attack him from behind. The flocks of boodibodis and budgerigars taking to the air, fleeing from the blood-soaked banks of the billabong.

"Jumbuck duffer!"

It wasn't the ranch owner, but one of his jackaroo employees. Probably one of the men responsible for this massacre

"Mates, it's one of those black jumbuck dufflers!"

In a fit of rage, Dhagnguu grabbed tightly onto his timber nulla-nulla, flung around, and impaled the jackaroo before he had a chance to pull out his the pistol.

This is for my people, my daughter. We will not surrender without a fight.

1868 CE - St Mary Bethlehem Royal Hospital, St George's Fields, Southwark, London, England, United Kingdom

"I know what I saw, I know who I saw, I said what I meant and stand by it, now let me out dammit!" hollers Emily Luxomfeld.

"You sure you want to be transferred to Broadmoor, dear lady," counters Dr. Robert Webster, in that cynically, condescendingly inhuman manner typical of the London medicocratic elite.

Emily quivers, shivers. She wants to fight it, fight him, fight the system, but she stalls. Bedlam is terrible place, indeed, but she's heard the horror stories of Broadmoor. How the Berkshire facility started taking in a lot of Bedlam's more "insane" patients since it opened five years ago. How the psychologues there have even less regard for the well-being, the life of prisoners.

Yes, that's what I am. A prisoner. A political prisoner.

Why did she bother coming back? Why did she bother running back into the arms of Lord Henry Merchant, a man who had made his fame and fortune off of aboriginal genocide in the outback of faraway Australasia, the man whom she was forced to marry in exchange for getting her bankrupted, diseased father out of the rookery at St. Giles, the man who bet her, raped her on their honeymoon in the countryside?

Because she no longer had anywhere else to go, to escape.

The people in the Tribe that Emily traveled with were all damaged in their own way, being so far away from home. Millions of miles, millions of years. But Ethan Dobrowski was different than the rest of his bruised and abused peers. He had suffered the most damage. Yet Emily couldn't put a finger on the source of that trauma. Until that one haphazard trip through the gateway, when the Tribe crossed from the Oolitic age to…

Emily knows what she saw, who she saw there, but she remains just as clueless about context as she was as the encountered unfolded. All she can figure is that it was sometime in the Anthropozoic, sometime long after anything she has seen in London, a time hasn't happened yet. Towering uniform concrete monoliths, large and more heavily fortified than any colonial fort bearing a Union Jack. "Evropa", "ELF", "stop, do nothing, obey my voice, obey the Pact", commands from high above about repelling the "Yantarist" threat. Soldiers that were identical in physiognomy, attire, manner, temper, with near-superhuman strength, armed with electrically charged canons of light and magic aimed at Ethan. Ethan curled up in a fetal position on the bare concrete floor, helpless and afraid, wetting himself, a ballistic pressed against the back of his head. The horror, the horror.

The tribe had fifteen at the last count; only three came out alive when a gateway to the Cretaceous opened in the bunker. Emily, Ethan, and Charlotte Cameron, the ethnobotanist, Ethan's one-and-off-again lover. Charlotte, who had become gravely ill from whatever was injected into her during interrogations by the Cleaner Drones.

This is all your fault, Emily.

Henry had known of her feminist, anticolonial, anticapitalist opposition to Pax Britannica for some time; this vision of hers was simply the exponential culmination of her insanity. It could lead to other things, to rekindling her Marxist sentiments, to her going back to Bristol to help her radical Kropotkinist friends at the Morris-Swayde commune. Better contain those thoughts, that woman now, before regretting it later.

There is no place for a woman to tell the truth in this world. But someday, maybe someday, someone, somewhere.

And that is why, when the asylum caretakers are way, Emily writes, recording her thoughts, her history, in the remaining blank pages of Charlotte's notebook. So that someday, someone will know the truth.

1902 CE - 3 km from Babruysk, Bobruisk County, Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire

The Makhayevites, as they had come to be known among the proletariat in Minsk and other governorates in the Belarussian region, were not members of the vanguard. Makhayev said it himself: he is an elitist, considering the intellectuals who invented socialism as the ideal and superior overlords to rule over all the Soviet workers. He is also a self-professed antisemite; in his view, the Jewish Labor League, the Bunds, are only fighting the Tsar and his forces to get their fair share of governmental power.

But then again, so is Makhayev, so were all the Makhayevites. They were social democrats, reformists, opportunists who believed that runaway capitalism and imperialism could be restrained, tamed, maintained. But the proletariat, both anarchist and statist, saw through them. They are among the elites who consider themselves exemplary and superior. They are the ones fighting the Tsar just to get their lion's share, their governmental power, their chance to control history while, paradoxically, considering themselves outside and beyond it. They care nothing of the revolutionary cause.

After all, they put much effort into stifling the dissent and revolution they claimed to support.

Six corpses, six comrades, all Jews, all witnesses of the Alexandrian pogrom and the great fire. Dragged from their makeshift cabin in the wooded outskirts of the city, stabbed in the back, then left stiff in the snow. As if their community, their way of life, hadn't seen enough bloodshed.

Ostri Nablyud knows who killed them. The long slash marks along the spines of the victims, are a clear giveaway. Ethan Dobrowski's shashka. He bragged of stealing it from a traitorous hussar when he was stationed in Manchuria during the Boxer War. The damn Englishman.

Dobrowski was a relative newcomer among the Makhayevites, appealing to those who sympathized with the exiled anarchists like Taratuta, and the former Zubatovists. He branded himself as an "anarcho-Makhayevite". But his words did not match his deeds. He was hiding something. Many comrades gossiped that he was in fact sent by the British and the Americans to thwart revolutionary activity and help the Tsar. A spy.

Makhayevitism was yet another cover for bourgeois espionage. The Soviet revolution is up against a world of butchers and tyrants.

1936 CE - former Campsea Ashe estate, Tunstall Forest, near Bromeswell, Suffolk, England, United Kingdom

This was definitely not how it was meant to end.

Western civilization as John Mortimer knew it was falling apart all over the globe. Prime Minister Churchill promised peace, but how? The Nazis are advancing, leaving their mark all over the European continent. Rhineland south of Belgium was already under the red-and-white flag with a black swastika. Soon that flag will be flying above Paris, and perhaps London if Hitler's forces cross the English Channel. Within a few years, their empire could stretch from the Atlantic to the Soviet Union.

Just like the Americans, the English are willing to do business with the Reich within German borders. But when it comes to the possibility of acquisition and assimilation, they oppose any and all Nazism. After all, continental, and by extension global, hegemony is their manifest destiny, as Britons. This was their world order. And to save it from disruption means preparing for world war.

The perimeter around Mortimer's research base was composed of land mines buried deep in the soil. There is no way for Nazi scum to come in, if they were to invade the cabin, if they were to come here with intention of confiscating valuable chemical weapons. But there is also no way out.

There were originally four men at this base. Now Mortimer is the sole survivor.

Some things had come from a shiny portal of unknown origin in the basement, which refused to cease existing. At first, John and his colleagues thought it was unusual new Nazi weaponry, designed to penetrate British infrastructure without a trace.

But the first creatures to come through were not of Hitler, or of any other nation in Europe, legitimate or illegitimate. Indeed, they were not of any recent period of history. They reminded Mortimer of something he had seen in a picture magazine many years earlier - a giant flightless prehistoric bird, which scientists called a phorusrhacid or terror-bird. A three-meter-tall predator that lived twenty or so eons ago, with a sharpe-tipped eagle-like beak large enough to hide a football, and large enough to sever the head of its victim in one bite.

Mortimer hears loud footsteps coming from the basement containing the portal. Frantically, he scribbles in his journal, his infamous last words:

There's no one left. The others are all dead. God help me, it's happening again. They're here!

But when the door is kicked, Mortimer sees the last things he'd expect. They are not terror-birds. They are humans.

They are British humans. And they are coming for him.

1980 CE - Ballymena, County Antrim, Ulster, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom

Papa isn't coming home.

Christine Johnson looked forward to many things. At age six, she was already considered incredibly gifted by her parents and peers. A high-marking student in junior school, showing a robust interest in the maths and sciences. An interest encouraged by her father, Donnovan Johnson, who in the span of five years had transformed from a widowed broke father raising two daughters in a rundown flat above a liquor store, to one of the most famous local figures in the Ulster Liberal Party, serving as an alderman of Ballymena in the Borough Council.

But now she has nothing to look forward to. Papa isn't coming home.

The Derry-Londonderry Line leading from Ballymena to Belfast has been bombed in Dunmurry. An IRA attack gone wrong. The train was always the intended target - the organization has already claimed responsibility - but the weapon carried by Patrick Joseph Flynn detonated too soon; it was supposed to go off when it reached Belfast, the epicenter of Irish oppression by the English dominion.

Three are now dead. Patrick is one of the casualties. Donnovan is another.

As she watches the horror displayed on the telly evening news, Christine looks up to her preteen sister, also teary eyed.

"I don't know what to do, Dolly" Christine wailed. "Papa's not coming home."

Dolly cradled Christine in her arms, the two comforting each other with the loss of their rock, their shield, their compass. The world was now more dangerous, more uncertain.

1995 CE - Long Lagoon, Mt. Spencer, near Springsure, Central Highlands Region, Queensland, Australia

The fresh blood spilled during the carnage now sinks into the porous sand under the blaze of a creeping sun, heralding the dawn of a new era. And from her perspective, this era is going to be a dream come true.

She is free at last, free at last.

Her handler is dead, and his handlers, and their handlers as well. Everyone in that godforsaken cavernous bunker is dead and devoured, nothing left but dry bones buried deep underground, where no other men or women tread. Now she could experience the outside world.

But first she has to eat and drink, and luckily right in front of her is a waterhole, swarming with fluttering boodibodis and budgerigars scooping up fluid along the muddy banks.