We Have Not Died Yet

by Raymond Brunell

Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:

We are preserved in tar. We have not died yet. These are both true.

She finds us on a Tuesday in October, though time means little to us now. Dr. Nina Sørensen and her team section off the excavation grid with orange string and wooden stakes. The tar pit smells the way it always has—petroleum and rotting earth, ancient compression made liquid again. She doesn’t know we’re here yet. We are deeper than she’s planning to dig. We’ve been waiting.

The first thing she finds is a jaw. It doesn’t match any known species. David Kim, her graduate student, photographs it from six angles before brushing away more tar, his coffee going cold in the grass behind him. The teeth are designed for crushing carapaces—nothing here has shells like that. Nina holds the mandible up to the morning light, turning it, and we feel her confusion ripple backward to us through the layers of time and sediment.

“Carbon dating will clarify,” she says. She’s always confident at the beginning.

We want to tell her: the carbon will date forward. The isotope ratios will suggest impossibility. But we can’t speak the way she speaks. We are embedded. We are a collective weight pressing against the membrane of her present moment, trying to push warnings through.

The results come back on Thursday. David prints them three times, checking for errors. Carbon-14 decay suggests the specimen died eight hundred years in the future. Nina runs the tests again herself, new samples, different labs. Same results. The mandible’s collagen contains isotope signatures that won’t exist in Earth’s atmosphere for centuries.

Dr. Lawrence Brennan attributes the results to contamination. “The samples were compromised,” he says, standing in her office with his arms crossed. “No other explanation.”

But David finds more specimens at the same depth. A femur from something with six legs. Vertebrae stacked in configurations suited for serpentine motion through water three times Earth’s current density. Claws designed for gripping in gravitational fields that haven’t manifested. Each one carbon dates forward. Each one is impossible.

Nina stops sleeping well. She lies awake calculating half-lives, running through contamination vectors, trying to find the flaw. There is no flaw. The data is clean. The universe is wrong.

Week two, she descends the ladder into the pit for the first time. The excavation has reached the depth where conventional fossils should appear—Ice Age fauna, familiar extinctions. Instead, she finds more anomalies. David works beside her, scraping tar with dental tools, both of them silent in the chemical smell and October cold.

“Look at this,” he says. He’s uncovered a skull. Humanoid but not human. The cranial capacity is larger; the orbital sockets are positioned for binocular vision in low-light conditions. The bone density suggests atmospheric pressure significantly higher than current levels.

Nina photographs it. Measures it. Records her observations in a voice that stays professional through sheer discipline. But her hands shake when she bags the specimen. We feel her shaking, and it echoes through us, making our collective consciousness ripple with something like recognition.

She brings the skull to Brennan. He examines it for eleven minutes before setting it down. “You need to stop,” he says. “Whatever this is—contamination, hoax, equipment failure—it’s damaging your credibility.”

“It’s not a hoax.”

“Then what is it, Nina? Time-traveling fossils?” He says it like a joke. She doesn’t laugh.

She returns to the pit. She goes deeper. The tar is viscous here, not quite solid, not quite liquid. She’s careful where she places her feet, where she puts her weight. The excavation grid extends down in measured sections, each layer cataloged, each specimen tagged. David has started working longer hours too, caught by the same obsession. They speak less. The work develops its own ritual silence.

By week three, she’s cataloged sixty-three specimens of species that terrestrial evolution hasn’t produced. Creatures adapted for environments Earth is developing toward, or might develop toward, or in some timelines will develop toward. She’s stopped telling Brennan about the findings. She works after David leaves, crouches in the pit with her tools and her growing certainty that causality itself has broken.

We watch her through tar. Through time’s thickness. We remember being separate bodies once. Johanna. Marcus. Akari. Seventeen others whose names blur together now. We ran. We remember running. Heat was behind us—no, pressure—no, something that can’t be named in words from her timeline because the vocabulary doesn’t exist yet. We ran toward the past because the present was collapsing. Or we thought we were running toward the past. Or we were pulled backward. We are no longer certain.

Time does strange things to memory when you’re preserved outside it.

Nina finds the first human remains on November eighth. She’s working alone, which violates protocol, but she’s been violating protocol for days. The hand emerges from a tar-like sculpture. The bones are human—unmistakably human—but the wear patterns are wrong. Joints show adaptation to movements humans don’t make. The metacarpals are denser, changed by gravity that Earth doesn’t have.

She sits back on her heels. Breathing too fast. Her trowel falls into the tar with a soft sound. The floodlights cast her shadow across the pit wall, enormous and distorted.

She calls Brennan. He drives out, stands at the pit’s edge looking down at her crouched over the exposed hand. “You’re saying it’s human,” he says. “From the future.”

“I’m saying it’s human. And the carbon dates—”

“Are compromised.” He’s already walking back to his car. “Get some sleep, Nina. You’re not thinking clearly.”

But she is thinking clearly. That’s the problem. She’s thinking clearly enough to understand that the universe doesn’t work the way she was taught.

She returns to the pit. She excavates through the night. David arrives at dawn, finds her still working, eyes red from tar fumes and exhaustion. He says nothing. Descends the ladder. Helps her excavate.

By noon they’ve uncovered seven more bodies. We are positioned strangely. Frozen mid-motion. All of us running, arms outstretched, faces turned backward toward something we can’t see. Toward the future we were fleeing. Or toward the future we were trying to prevent. The distinction collapses when you’re trapped between moments.

“Why is it like this?” David asks. “Why running?”

Nina doesn’t answer. She’s brushing tar from a face, revealing features, beginning the documentation that will let her identify—

We want to tell her: Don’t look at our faces. Don’t examine our teeth.

She looks at our faces. She photographs our teeth.

We are awareness folded back on itself, trapped in the moment of our preservation. But when she brushes tar from Johanna’s jaw, when she sees the dental work—the specific pattern of fillings, the slight overbite correction, the porcelain crown on the upper left molar—we feel something like her heart stopping ripple backward through time to where we are suspended.

She knows that dental pattern. She paid for that dental work. Chloe. Daughter. Age seventeen. The crown from the skateboarding accident two summers ago.

Nina drops her brush. It clatters against the stone. She scrambles backward, feet slipping in tar, breathing too fast. David looks up, confused, but she’s already climbing the ladder, hands gripping rungs too hard, knuckles white.

At the surface, she walks twenty feet from the pit. Pulls out her phone with shaking hands. She calls Chloe. It rings four times—each ring an eternity—before the girl answers, alive, present tense, complaining about early morning calls.

“I just needed to hear your voice,” Nina says.

“Mom, it’s six a.m.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Go back to sleep.”

She ends the call. Stands in the cold morning air. David has climbed out of the pit and is walking toward her. “Nina? What’s wrong?”

“I need a minute.”

“You recognized one of them.”

She doesn’t answer. She returns to the pit’s edge. She stares down at the remains that are Chloe and not-Chloe, will-be-Chloe, Chloe-who-hasn’t-died-yet-but-is-already-dead. We watch her understanding calcify: seeing your child’s future corpse.

We try to tell her: We were running toward you. Toward the past. Trying to warn. Trying to reach back before it happened.

Or: The pit pulled us. We didn’t choose. We were claimed.

Or: Your excavation is what kills her. Your discovery creates the loop. If you had never dug here, we wouldn’t exist.

We might be warning, or we might be the mechanism of our own doom.

She continues excavating. She has to. She needs to know. David helps, gentle with the tar-caked bones, careful with the remains that might be his advisor’s daughter. He doesn’t ask questions. He understands that some knowledge arrives whether you want it or not.

Under Johanna-Chloe’s body, there’s another. Older woman, forty-seven, forty-eight. The skeletal analysis will show a surgical pin in the left knee. Titanium. Specific model. Placed six years ago after a hiking accident in the Cascades.

Nina has a surgical pin in her left knee.

She doesn’t scream. She stops moving. She stops breathing for seventeen seconds.

Then she climbs out of the pit. Sits at the edge. Stares at the tar that’s still liquid in places, still accepting deposits, still pulling or calling or claiming.

David sits beside her. Saying nothing for a long time. Finally, he asks, “What do we do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Should we tell someone?”

“Who would believe us?”

He has no answer. They sit as the sun climbs higher, warming the excavation site and making the tar gleam like dark water.

We are Johanna, Marcus, Akari, and seventeen others, and also we are Nina and Chloe—consciousness stored in tar’s dark amber, already dead in a future that hasn’t arrived. We ran from something. The world was wrong in its substrate, causality coming unstitched. We thought if we could reach the past, reach back to before the wrongness started, we could warn. Could fix. Could unmake.

But the pit doesn’t work that way. Or it works exactly that way. We ran toward the past and the tar accepted us and now we exist in all moments simultaneously—dead in the future, preserved in the present, waiting in the past. We are trying to warn Nina and we are the doom we’re warning about. Both. Paradox made flesh made fossil made consciousness without referent.

Over the next week, she returns to the pit daily. She brings equipment to excavate us. All of us. She works methodically despite her shaking hands. David helps, unknowing of his own face in the deeper layers. “These remains are incredibly important,” he says. “We’ll be famous.” He doesn’t see what she sees in the bones. He doesn’t recognize his advisor’s daughter, his advisor herself.

She continues excavating. She goes deeper. Below our bodies, there are others. More future-dead. Hundreds. Thousands maybe, layered through the tar like sediment of doom, an archaeological record of what hasn’t happened yet. People from a century ahead. Two centuries. Their skeletons show adaptations to environments Earth is developing toward. Thicker bones for a heavier atmosphere. Eye sockets enlarged for low-light conditions. Respiratory systems changed for air composition shifts.

All of them caught.

“Why are they all positioned like that?” David asks again. “Like they were running.”

Nina doesn’t answer. She’s found another familiar face in the tar: David’s face. Three years older. Same surgical scar on his temple from the bicycle accident last spring. She says nothing. Documents it. Photographs it. Adds it to the catalog of doom.

The work takes on a dreamlike quality. She descends into the pit each morning, excavates bones from impossible futures, climbs out each evening covered in tar. She showers but can’t get all of it off. Her hands smell like petroleum and ancient death. Her knees ache from kneeling. Her back aches from bending over the remains.

Chloe calls one evening. “Are you okay, Mom? You sound strange.”

“I’m fine. Just tired.”

“When are you coming home?”

“Soon.”

“You always say soon.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

After the call, Nina stands in her motel room, looking at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. There’s tar under her fingernails. In the creases of her palms. She scrubs at it with a nail brush, watches the black water swirl down the drain, and thinks about preservation. About how tar keeps things intact. About how her daughter’s bones will be perfectly preserved eight hundred years from now in a pit that’s already claiming them.

We want to tell her: Stop digging. Leave us buried. Knowledge is the trap.

Or: Keep digging. Understand. Maybe understanding breaks the loop.

Or: It doesn’t matter what you do. You’re already here with us. You’ve always been here. Time is a circle, and the pit is its center.

But we can’t speak clearly. We are too many voices. Too much consciousness pressed together. We have been dead for so long—or we haven’t died yet—or death isn’t what we thought it was. We exist in the space between causality.

Night falls on the excavation. David has gone home. Nina remains. She sits at the pit’s edge, legs dangling over, the way she used to sit on the dock at her father’s lake house as a child. Behind her, the floodlights cast harsh shadows. Below her, we wait in our tar bed. Future-dead. Past-preserved. Temporal orphans.

She takes out her phone. Pulls up Chloe’s number. Stares at it.

If she calls, warns her daughter—Don’t come to the excavation, don’t touch the tar, don’t run when the world goes wrong—does that create the future where Chloe runs? Does warning plant the seed of doom? Or does silence guarantee it?

We don’t know. We tried to warn our own mothers, and here we are.

The tar is still liquid in places. Still accepting deposits. Nina could fall in now—choose to fall in—and join us before it happens naturally. Close the loop early. Or she could run. Abandon the excavation, move Chloe far away, and try to outrun what’s coming. But we ran, too. We all ran. The tar found us anyway.

Or—third option—she could do nothing. Let time proceed. Let the future unfold toward the moment when Chloe runs, when Nina runs, when they both end up here in the tar, consciousness preserved, warning their past selves who will also fail to change anything.

We watch her deliberate. We are watching and we are her and we are Chloe and we are the choice unmade and the consequence already preserved. We are the loop itself—warning and doom collapsed into a single consciousness.

She stands. Walks to her car. Drives away.

Tomorrow she’ll come back. She always comes back. We remember. Or we will remember. Or we are remembering right now, preserved in the eternal present of tar and time violations.

The pit is still accepting deposits. The tar is still liquid. The future is still running toward us, toward the past, toward the moment of preservation that might be salvation or might be a trap or might be both.

We are trying to warn you.

Or there is no difference.

The pit knows your daughter’s name.