Meet the Saurs

Short stories about a fictional species known as the Saurs.

Throughout my childhood, I’ve come up with many stories about a group of characters known as the Saurs. I’d like to share some of these stories with you so we can laugh about them together and so that they can be recorded in the oversized archives that are zSnout. This article is meant to be read in order, as each new topic links back to previous ones, but you can stop at any point and come back at a later date; there’s a lot to take in. With that disclaimer, let’s step into the technology-filled world of the Saurs!

Meet the Cast

The Saurs are a group of animals that share similar attributes. Many of them look different, but they all share a common love of technology. Most Saurs have a name related to what they do, such as I-like-eating-chicken-saur, but five of them have special names: Bulba, Ivy, Vena, Sam, and Hyacinth. Bulba (he/him) was the second Saur. My family first found him in Mexico on February 21. Later on, we found Ivy (he/him) and Vena (he/him) through online shopping, Sam (he/him) in an overseas trip, Hyacinth (she/her) at a theme park, and Char (they/them) was found by somebody else.

The first Saur to ever exist was Mudsaur (any/all). Mudsaur lives in Yellowstone National Park, a favorite location for its excess quantities of mud. However, they haven’t done much in terms of running the Saur world. The major player in that has been Bulba, due to his multiple years of experience in the world before the other came into existence, but we’ll talk about Bulba’s exploits a little later.

The Naming Scheme and Opposition Law

The Saurs are always trying to be confusing. There’s head-twisting stories about time travel, narratives involving negative birds and resurrecting Michelangelo from the dead, and then there’s the Opposition Law.

After Mudsaur popped into existence (nobody’s really sure how it happened, but there are guesses), they enacted a law stating that henceforth, all Saurs were to be named the opposite of what they did. If someone requested a Saur that loves parachuting, its name would be I-hate-parachuting-with-all-of-my-soul-saur. The longer the name, the better. Somehow, Bulba, Ivy, Vena, Sam, Hyacinth, and Char all escaped this debacle, but nobody else was okay. There’s a Saur so smart that they use a normal math system (yes, the Saurs have their own math system) called Dumbsaur, and their opposite, Smartsaur, who is the dumbest Saur in the world, except for Dumbest-in-the-world-saur.

Eventually the Opposition Law was removed at some point due to a Saur going against what their name stood for and it threatened to break down all of everything. Thus, the law was removed. However, to “minimize confusion,” all existing Saurs continued to have the same names. Because Saurs only come into existence when someone speaks their name, this led to duplicated qualities. For example, both Dumbsaur and Really-smart-saur are among the cleverest and smartest Saurs around, despite their names being complete opposites.

Now that we’ve skipped around that little detour, let’s get onto the fun technology by talking about Bulba’s first project: Tessie.

Tessie the Robot

One day in a parking lot, Bulba took a car wheel and made it into a really bad, really dumb robot. However, it had just enough power to make a slightly more advanced AI. That one made another, and the third one made a fourth, and so on. Eventually this chain of robots created a Tesla-like car that Bulba called “Tessie.” Tessie had the ability to change the temperature of the car at a molecular level, could go into the water at a depth further than Challenger Deep, and could even survive being blasted into a volcano.

Bulba used Tessie to drill to the center of the Earth and created a lair there inside the deepest layers of the Earth. Most volcanoes on Earth now have a specific corner of them that looks like a regular interior, but is actually a hologram and one of the few entrances to the lair of the Saurs.

But what if a Saur accidentally falls in the lava when entering their home?

The Whole Resurrection Thing

An interesting fact about the Saurs is that they cannot lie. If a Saur says something that is currently not happening, it immediately bends the universe until it is no longer a falsehood. For example, say Ivy wanted a backpack. He could just say “Ivy has a 50-foot backpack,” and it would pop into existence. A natural consequence of this is that Saurs cannot really die. Imagine that Bulba fell into lava while entering his lair. Vena could claim that “Bulba’s not dead,” and all of a sudden he wouldn’t be.

This constraint also applies to most of the things created by the Saurs, and the Saurs have created a lot of things. One of their more special and unique products are a thing known as SaurAirs. These tiny objects take up less space than an individual atom and can duplicate themselves. Because of this, SaurAirs have spread long and far across the universe. Every atom has millions of SaurAirs, and unique compression technology allows each object to store multiple yottabytes of data. How much is this? The Library of Congress is estimated to have around 15 terabytes of data. A yottabyte is approximately a 66 billion times larger than that, and SaurAirs can store multiple of these. SaurAirs power all of the Saurs’ infrastructure.

More About SaurAirs

Because SaurAirs are everywhere and in everything, it is possible for them to change the subatomic contents of the atom they’re in. This allows SaurAirs to modify the entire world at their will. This allows the Saurs to deliver amazing out-of-this-world products that are only visible to specific people (by modifying neuron streams) and send data faster than the speed of light (but we’ll get to that later). This allows the Saurs to upgrade their devices remotely and without needing any hardware changes, as everything is done from their encrypted systems. Of course, SaurAirs have advanced security measures built into them. Because they can literally access the contents of the universe, SaurAirs can identify different objects, people, Saurs, and creatures with a 100% correctness rate and only deliver data to people that they have permission to access.

You’ve probably thought of numerous other applications for SaurAirs in the fields of health, computing, science, athletics, mathematics, and many others. But let’s hear about one of the Saurs’ favorite use for them: to clone the universe.

Duplicating the World

Because SaurAirs have access to the direct data that powers the entire world, they can create temporary or permanent copies of the universe. This is powered by the immense storage of all SaurAirs. In the “Frames” app on all Saur devices, users can create infinite copies of the universe. In a copy, users can choose to make themselves godlike and have the powers to create, destroy, and modify anything that they see. A common application of this is in photos and videos. Imagine how much better your photos could be if you could add colored lights anywhere you pleased and if you could rotate the scene around any viewpoint you choose. Because SaurAirs have so much storage, Saur photos actually contain a snapshot of the world and have more editing capabilities than anything people can possibly imagine.

Of course, it might appear awkward to friends if you disappear into an alternate universe for minutes at a time just to take a good photo. That’s why Frames, by default, freeze the external world for up to 5 minutes while you’re in an alternate dimension. To anyone who isn’t in the alternate dimension, the world will still seem normal. The Saurs use these capabilities every day as often as people take standard pictures, but you don’t notice any freezing or strange tears as you walk around on Earth, do you? Of course not. The Saurs’ technology has been perfected over trillions of years spent in alternate universes that you haven’t noticed.

Additionally, SaurAirs can create fluid experiences between Frames. You can have a duplicate of the universe that you enter via a door in your house, or you can “glue” the same wall of your house and universe. How would you notice that you had entered an alternate Frame? Well, SaurAirs have the ability to dynamically position any content they want to over what you see, because they have access to your neural system. In fact, this is how you are able to be put into an alternate dimension. SaurAirs simply change the typical connections to your senses and plug in fake data generated by computing the universe. They then override signals that you give to move your arms, open your mouth, and control other muscles.

Anyway, SaurAirs use these capabilities to add an indicator in the top-left of your vision that shows that you’re in an alternate reality. This indicator has many uses and can modify itself at will. Let’s talk a bit more about how the Saurs use XR (Extended Reality) in their projects.

XR (Extended Reality)

You’ve probably heard of AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) before. XR is the general term that encompasses both of these. The robots of the Saurs took little under a few hours to create working headsets and stylish glasses for each, so they set out to fight the next big challenge. In one of their global meetings, Ivy proposed that SaurAirs could be used to augment someone’s mind with a digital Frame. The Saurs began developing amazing experiences using the SaurAir technology. Like we discussed previously, they created devices that were only visible to specific people. But that’s not where the stopped.

The Saurs took AR to the extreme and were able to create virtual movie theaters that showed and played movies as if they were happening right in front of you. You could feel Ethan’s pain when his teammates died while watching Mission Impossible, or play along with Michael as he walked through work in The Office. Movies and TV shows could work with all of this new technology without any manual upgrades, thanks to the Saurs’ powerful AI systems. You could use the Engineering app and learn how to construct an actual rocket that would take you to the moon, free of charge. Throughout all of this, the Saurs discovered ways to travel throughout time and space even faster than the speed of light, but that’s a story for another day.

Wrap Up

Congratulations! You just finished reading a 1700-word article about the Saurs. Hopefully it was fun and interesting as we walked through the possibilities of a universe where technology reigns supreme. Stay on the lookout for stories about how Vena became the lord of our universe, how the Saurs managed to conquer time travels once and for all, and how the Opposition Law was finally removed. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next time on the zSnout blog.