“Whoa. Are those herons? I thought we went back zillions of years.”
“We did. There’s fossil evidence that herons have been around tens of millions of years, back to the Miocene epoch.”
“Holy crap. We’re in the Miocene?”
“Hardly. We’re barely in the Pleistocene, but by then Great Blue Herons had made their way to the western hemisphere.”
“So we’ve traveled, what, about a million years back in time?”
“About that, yeah.”
“In a machine you built yourself.”
“Yup.”
“That’s amazing. That’s truly the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s just beautiful.”
“Yeah.”
“We were aiming for 1776, though.”
“Don’t even start with me.”