I Went to a Tech Convention. They Opened a Door to Jurassic Park | Part 1

The full two-part series of "I Went to a Tech Convention," they opened a portal to Jurassic Park, is live on Patreon right now. Start your seven-day free trial of Dr. No Sleep Premium to hear both parts instantly. No delays, no waiting. Cancel any time, no commitment. Just go to patreon.com/drno sleep to sign up. The link is also in the description below. That's patreon.com/drno sleep. As he waited for his turn to speak to the feds, Wayne Travers tried making a fist with his right hand, resulting in a shooting pain down that forearm. EMS had cleaned and bandaged the exotic teeth marks in his flesh, but he feared it would be weeks before his strength and flexibility would be back to normal. Hell, it'd be a while before anything was back to normal, wouldn't it? "You hurt him?" asked his daughter, jet, ducking below some police barricade tape to join him. "Nah," said Wayne. "How about you, kiddo?" "They'll got all your fingers and toes." "Pretty sure, yeah. But the sooner we're on the road, the better." Wayne winked down at the 11-year-old, in her blood splattered undershirt in jeans, then he ruffled her short hair with his left hand, liberating a puff of dust. Other survivors stood or sat in clumps around the lobby of the convention center, while members of Las Vegas swat did sweeps of the place. The power was still out inside the colossal building, not to mention that whole part of Vegas, but sunlight shone through the glass walls at the entrance. Wayne pulled off his cap with his left hand, and wiped his brow without sleeve, watching as paramedics rolled out yet another body bag on a gurney. "Sir, you two, yes. We're ready for you." Wayne and Jettobaid, walking over to the reception counter. It was the same spot where they had been given badges that morning, by an annoyingly chipper staff member. But now the person across the counter gave them only a grim and dubious stare. The letters FBI were printed across the woman's tactical vest. "Right, so you are," she checked her laptop's screen. "Wayne Travers, yes. And this must be your cowboy son, Jett." "I'm a girl," Jett corrected. "Whatever. It says in my file that you, Mr. Travers, are the identical twin brother of Randolph Travers, CEO of Traver Tech, and the keynote speaker at the convention this morning. Is that correct? Was the identical twin brother? Yep. Sorry for your loss." "You don't sound sorry." "Well, it's been a long day." "You don't have to tell us," said Wayne, suppressingly on. "We got on the road at three this morning. All the breeding bulldo a buddy in St. George on the way down here from our ranch." "Is that right?" She typed for a few more seconds, then glanced up at Wayne, looking unconvinced. Wayne sighed. "Let me guess. For an identical twin, I don't look much like Randolph." "Well, that asshole. May he rest in peace." Had hair plugs, a team of personal stylists and more Botox than a Kardashian, whereas "I prefer to live," as he put it, "like some dusty old farmand." Chet nodded. "And we got to get back to our dusty old farm ASAP. There's restless animals need tendon too." "You'll be clear to leave once we're done here, but expect multiple agencies to reach out in the coming days, not to mention the press, giving your connection to this morning's incident." Wayne gave an angry little shake of his head. "We don't have nothing to do with Travertec, or the goddamn quark, or anything that went down this morning. That was all Randy," the dumb bastard. "May he rest in peace," Chet added. "May he rest in peace." "All right, then. I know that you already went over this with a local officer, but it doesn't look like they took any statement from Chet here. Plus, I'd like to hear it myself, so when did you two arrive? Why were you at the convention today? And how the actual fuck did a pack of bloodthirsty dinosaurs end up beating a bunch of tech bros at 10 o'clock this morning?" Traffic around the center had been a nightmare when they arrived, so finding a place to park would have been hard even if Wayne didn't have the 30-foot stock trailer hitched behind his pickup truck. In the end, he parked the truck on a service road a couple of minutes walk from the convention center, then woke Chet in the passenger seat. "We there?" "Yup. Though, sure you still want to go to this thing, because if we got back on the road now, then odd geez little wheeze, Dad. You're just embarrassed because you're underdressed." "Speak for yourself, kiddo. Those jeans have seen better days." "I wore these when I became Utah Junior Bull riding champ. Not to mention when I broke Mustang Milley, they're my lucky jeans." Wayne rolled his eyes. "I don't know, let myself get roped into this shit anyway." "But of course, he knew how." Wayne hadn't seen his brother face to face in over a year, not since their mother's funeral, and when the ranch's landline rang a week before the convention, an eard Randolph's voice on the other end, he had almost hung up right away. "Howdy stranger, how's the family farm? Still falling apart one fence post at a time?" "Go fuck yourself, Randy. We don't need your money." "Like hell you don't, but this isn't about that." Randolph had gone on to insist that Wayne come down to Las Vegas to see Travertex' latest big reveal, to which the rancher's answer was brief and to the point. "Fuck off, Randy." "Don't hang up. This is something special. Really special. And hey, you know what? Bring Jack too. Is that little tomboy niece of mine still into dinosaurs? Or is he too busy wrangling cattle and winning rodeo ribbons?" "My daughter is a warm blooded American. Of course she's into dinosaurs." "And that settles it. Because what I've got will blow her little mind. I'll see you both there." "It'll probably be boring as hell." Wayne grumbled. As they walked down a back alley toward the secluded corner of the big, glassy convention center. "And the whole dinosaur thing's just going to be some gimmick. He's probably unveiling some gadget called the Triceratablit or some shit." "Actually, Travertex is mostly leaning into AI now, like all the rest. Everyone knows that." "Ooh, maybe the reveal will be ChatGBT Rex." "I don't get it." "Now it was Jets turn to roll her eyes." "Welcome to the future. And please enjoy the convention." Wayne sneered at the young man beaming at them from across the counter. Then snatched up the lanyards offered to them. Handing one of the badges to Jets, he reluctantly slid the other over his cap and around his neck. They wandered through the crowded lobby. And their dusty flannel and denim, the father and daughter duo stood out against the sea of tech nerds, mostly young men in gray hoodies, with sun-starved skin and hunchbacked posture of phone junkies. "Why do you think you and Uncle Randolph are such different people, given that you have the same DNA in all?" Jed asked her dad. As they headed through one of the colossal exhibit halls, with tech stalls and gadget demos crowded along each side. "Randy got dumped on his head a lot as a baby. That's my theory anyway. Though your grandma was denoted." Wayne glared distrustfully at a robot dog, as it marched mechanically past them, and placed a protective hand on Jets' shoulder. The robots remote control wielding handler chuckled. "No, don't worry. It doesn't bite." Wayne made a noise in his throat, almost a growl. But his daughter tugged on his sleeve and they moved on. Jed glanced up at a 3D projection of a flying heron, hovering in place over one of the booths. "So, uh, Uncle Randolph. He's a genuinely bad person, right?" she asked, avoiding eye contact with her dad, and fidgeting with the lanyard's strap around her neck. "Uh-huh. What does that mean like, cheats on his tacks as bad, or dumps chemicals in the drinking water bad?" "Or, worse?" "All of the above, kiddo." They arrived at the entrance to the auditorium and stopped, looking up at the video screen over the door, showing a loop of teasers for the day's events. The faces of the conventions keynote speakers smiled down at them one at a time, ultra-wealthy tech CEOs, venture capitalists, and celebrity spokesman. And top of the list was the man whose talk would begin momentarily. Randolph Travers. "He does look like you," Jed admitted. "But only if someone tied you down, glued a pump of door wig on your head, then stretched back all the skin on your face, till it looked like shiny plastic. Very weird." "Well, come on, then. This is a bad idea, so we might as well get it over with." They spotted the real Randolph Travers standing just off stage. Hands in the pockets of his blazer, veneers gleaming like a chess shire cat. Several excitable nerds and a handful of journalists were trying to get close enough to the tech billionaire for selfies or interviews. But their path was blocked by a positively massive security guard in a black suit and earpiece. "Why, hey there, Mr. Travers!" the security guard called out when they approached. "And hello, young Miss Travers! Nice to see you guys made it!" "Hey, Bubs!" Bubs had been round off's head of security for a few years now, traveling everywhere with the CEO. Wayne and Jet had met him back at a Traverse Family Thanksgiving dinner in 2024, when Bubs had memorably eaten no less than 15 servings of mashed potatoes and gravy. In Jet's eyes, the man was a hero. "Any new hunting stories?" Bubs asked, Wayne. "Nah, not really. Haven't had the time." "Well, come on through you, too." "Tea Tech has a reserved area at the front." Jet started forward, but her dad reached out and pulled her back. "No thanks, Bubs. Think we'll find somewhere in the back." Wayne turned, noting the strange looks people were giving him. A few took photos on their phones. It wasn't every day they saw a rough and tumble, dusty doppelganger of one of their tech heroes. "See you after, Bubs!" Grumbling, Wayne found them two empty seats just off the aisle. Jet sighed, "You got a chill, Dad. It's just a silly event. We shouldn't have come, kiddo. I shouldn't have even told you about the invite. I swore to myself after your grandma died that I was done with a randy." "Dad, chill! Seriously? What's the worst that can happen?" The lights and the vast auditorium dimmed. The doors all closed electronically, and the conversations around them went reverently quiet. Jet watched her uncle bound onto the stage and into the spotlight, waving and grinning his unnaturally white smile as he took his place in front of the closed curtains. Clapping along with most of the crowd, Wayne, of course, being an exception. Jet settled in. As her uncle ran off, tapped the little microphone on his collar to check the signal, and turned to face the crowd. "Good morning, everyone. I hope you're all ready for an unforgettable presentation. We're living through a special time in history, aren't we? An era of unparalleled technological advancement, and with it, wealth creation like the world has never known. Why? Just last month, I got up for one night for a midnight pee and decided to tweet about this silly dream I'd had. A dream, where an AI-powered robot was giving my girlfriend a foot massage while I watched from under the bed, pulling out my teeth one by one and swallowing them, funny stuff. By the next morning, I'd forgotten about the whole damn thing, but that little late-night tweet somehow made Trevor Tech's stock jump eight points and earned me another 4 billion bucks, huh? What a great system. And yet, success like mine does come with a certain dark side, an issue that I struggle with daily, and one that I know weighs heavily on many of you as well. Simply put, what the hell am I supposed to do with all the money I've made? Yes, there comes a time in every successful man's life. When he looks around at his purchases, mansions and yachts, his sports franchises and media conglomerates and politicians, and he exclaims, "Surely, there must be more to life than this. There must be a better use for my billions." Now, I know some of you think the answer is up there, in outer space. But you know what's actually in space? Nothing. That's why it's called space. And let's be honest, space is boring. Even as a kid, I never wanted to be an astronaut. I was more interested in things right here on Earth, and the Wild West, and the Roman Empire, and mammoths, and woolly rhinos, and things that were even older. And that's when the answer came to me, and I knew what I wanted to do next. Ladies and gentlemen, my esteemed guests and colleagues, let's draw these curtains so that I may proudly reveal my new favorite toy, and soon to be yours. I present to you the future. Or should I say, the past! Jet leaned forward in her seat as the curtains behind her uncle swiftly opened to either side, revealing. Revealing? Huh? The object suspended over the stage looked to be nothing more or less than a huge rectangle of fog to glass set in a black frame, with wires extending into the wings offstage. What is it supposed to be, travers? Called out a voice from the crowd. Some sort of big screen, or a window, 'cause we already have those! Actually, you're right. This is a screen, and it is a window. And like all windows, it allows you to see what's on the other side. Allow me to demonstrate! Randolph jogged excitedly to the right hand edge of the hanging screen, then moved behind it. The audience could still see his feet beneath the bottom of the frame, but the rest of him was slightly blurred by the fog to glass. Randolph shuffled sideways, pumping his hands in the air as if to raise the roof. Next to Jet, Wayne hung his head. "Oh God, Randy, don't try to dance." "And I'm back!" Randolph announced, emerging from the left hand side of the screen, and jogging back to the center of the stage. "Cringe!" hooded a voice from the front row. "Worst product reveal ever!" "Oh, come on, really? Didn't you shatter your new truck's windows on stage?" "Twice? You suck, travers!" "All right, all right, let's get back to my thing." "Where was I?" "I guess. Behold, my creation. I call it the quantumly unified apparatus for relativistic crono-inverted vision, or quark. Get it? That acronym sucks. Chrono was spelled with a C sh*tard. Sh*t up, Elon." As I was saying, utilizing a hybrid approach, in which Travertex latest photonic quantum processor chips run our proprietary AGI prediction algorithms, we've trained quark here to create probability models of a given space at a given time, probability models with 100% accuracy. In other words, I've invented the crystal ball. "Bullsh*t! Now one can see the future, travers!" "No, of course we can't see the future. It is a chaos of everbranching uncertainties, where something as trivial as the beat of a butterfly's wings, or one of my midnight dream tweets come to that, can shape the world in ways no one could guess. But the past? The past is fixed. It is certain. One path, all the other branches pruned. So quark here merely takes a snapshot at a quantum level of the current state of reality. Then, working backwards, it recreates the path of each particle to a previous moment in time. Do you get it? There's billions of years of stuff that happened right here on Earth. Endless content. And now I've unlocked it all. A window to the past. That's what this is, gentlemen. Sound good to be true? Then how about a proper demonstration? As the audience watched, growing increasingly restless, Randolph pulled out his phone and began tapping. I am instructing quark to look backward, and show us the past from two minutes ago. Oh, don't mind that. Just a little electromagnetic interference. But quark's processors are actually very efficient, and the machine only uses the annual power of a mid-sized city every second. Right then, let's boogie! The screen over the stage flickered, then seemed to return to normal, revealing only the stage behind it, until the image of Randolph travers edged around the right hand side of the glass and appeared to shuffle sideways behind it, pumping its hands in the air. "Ah, Jesus," Browned Wayne. "This is the dumbest shit I've ever seen." "I mean, yeah, it's not a great presentation, but at least the image quality on the screen is pretty good," said Jet, as her uncle's image reached the far end of quark and vanished. "Boo!" "I see you're not all that impressed, and no kidding. I mean, recreating what happened two minutes ago? What's the fun in that? So let's go further, shall we? How about a sly grin curled the corners of his lips? 200 million years!" Jet felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. The exit signs in the room flickered. The speakers hummed, even the phones and people's hands began to glitch. "The hill has happened! It's like the villains in my mullers are rattling." "Wait! Just a moment more, and now!" "Is that?" "Wow!" There on the stage, suspended in its black frame. The quark screen now showed a rectangle of misty colors, deep greens, browns, reds, and blues shown out across the crowd. The image wasn't perfect, but as the rise adjusted, the audience began to make out the slightly blurred shapes of giant ferns, gently swaying as if in a breeze and a pair of lofty conifers off to one side. The vegetation stood at the base of high red sand dunes reaching up a cerulean sky. Take it in, folks! Last Vegas, as it was in the early Jurassic Period, and this isn't just some AI generated video we're looking at. It's a perfect recreation. The very same frequencies of light we we would see if we were sitting right here all those epochs ago, a model of reality that is just as real as reality itself. "Why is it blurry?" Someone called out. "Can't you enhance it, Travers?" "Ah well, yes. Technically I could, but my scientists have warned me that increasing the clarity too much could be potentially problematic." "Boo! Excuse us!" "No, no, really. What you have to realize is that at the quantum scale, everything in the universe is essential to be just an excitation of a quantum field, meaning there's really no difference between light and matter, so. " "Inhance the image, coward!" "Your shareholder's expected more. Suck my balls, Travers, you dumb dick!" "Hey, fuck you guys. I basically made a time machine here. How about you show a little respect?" "Oh, we can't even see what it is. Like what are those shapes moving down the dunes?" "Oh, you know what? Fine. You win." "If you morons can't even appreciate, well, you want clarity, I'll give you goddamn clarity." "House, this!" "Wait, are those things moving up there? Are they really?" "Yup, they are." "Holy shit. What species are they, Jet? Raptors or something?" Jet shook her head and stood, leaning over the seat in front of her, her eyes as wide as her smile. "They're too big to be raptors, I think. I think they're Delafa Soros. Whoa! Delafa Soros, those of the little frilly ones in Jurassic Park, right? Didn't they spit Venom? They didn't really spit Venom, that's just made up for the movie. Gotcha. And they were also not cute and frilly. They were vicious predators, 20 feet long, a thousand pounds, with a dozen hooked claws and a hundred serrated teeth. Uh-huh. Boy, look at them charge, Dad, it's like they're, like they're coming right at us. Now, now calm down, everyone, I'll just make some adjustments and, whooops, uh-oh, hey Zuckerberg, be a pal real quick and toss my phone back up here, will ya, before." Jet winced as the screen blazed with sudden light in motion, then felt her father's strong hands, caesar by the arm, and pull her backward. Someone screamed, something screeched, then the power in the whole convention center, in the whole of Las Vegas, in every building and every appliance and every cell phone pulsed, and went out. And darkness settled around them, thick as tar, and heavy as the weight of ages. Breathe in and out, in and out, Dad, shh, did what I think just happened, really happened? Whatever happens, kiddo, stay with me. Run, Jet! Run! [MUSIC]