Deep Time is a story about how physical depth encodes the almost unimaginably distant history that took place before humans emerged to scratch the last few moments of it onto tablets and scrolls. The protagonist, a miner sent down to drill for precious metals, gems, and oils, is not only digging up materials of industrial value, they are excavating the end products of biogeochemical processes that happened on an inhuman time scale. It takes a million lifetimes to make a drop of petroleum, something we burn up just to leave a driveway. That’s not an indictment of personal guilt, that’s a foundational fact of existence: all present things constitute the iceberg tips of hyperobjects embedded in a volume of time so vast as to render itself invisible, just as we cannot help but see the walls of a room at a glance but must squint to notice the curvature of the planet. We think in individual events and objects but the true driving forces of creation are dizzyingly complex systems in which we are enmeshed merely as tiny pieces.

All of that said, Deep Time is also a science-fantasy adventure story about digging up magic glowing crystals, because that tiny personal level matters to us humans, and if our lives expire in a cosmological blink then we might as well have fun with them.

What follows is a list of the stratigraphic layers of the Earth’s crust, as will reveal themselves to our forthcoming hero. Changes are likely to occur as writing continues, so don’t overly concern yourself with spoilers.

---

Postmodern

The post-post-apocalyptic civilization that constitutes the “present day” of the story. Gleaming towers of quartz jut from the ground, grown from seed crystals using “flux” magitechnology to force their development into desired shapes. Marble statues litter the hexagonal city blocks, their mass construction made viable by the marvelous discoveries of geochemy – and cheap cloned labor to mine the necessary materials from beneath the streets.

Anthropocene

The first interesting geologic layer, corresponding roughly to what we would vaguely recognize as modern-day civilization – or at least a fantasy facsimile of it. Put simply, the steel-plastic-concrete junk stratum. Nuclear-powered robots guard arcology-bunkers leftover from before the war. Not a place of honor, but plenty of artifacts to dig up if you’re willing to risk a little radiation poisoning.

Paleolithic

The birth-age of the mitochondrial Eve, grandmother of all living humans, who transcended death through a special form of amber that preserved living things submerged within it as though frozen in time. She founded an empire as advanced as any in recorded antiquity, but archaeological evidence disintegrated after its collapse, as her people built with biodegrading wood and bone, inlaid with pearl, jet, and remigium.

Phanerozoic

Broadly, the period of time recognizable to the general public as “prehistoric”: the age of ammonites and dinosaurs, technically encompassing all the layers prior. Haunted by Carboniferous coal revenants and stalked by Cretaceous closed-loop cave survivors in prototaxite forests. Contains the fruits of the Cambrian Explosion.

Proterozoic

The stratum deposited over a geologic era three times longer than all the previous periods combined. Life as we know it only consisted of simple microscopic creatures during this era, but miners still covet the layer for its inclusion of wreckage from an extraterrestrial incursion: advanced technology from a spacefaring species that visited the planet hundreds of millions of years ago.

Archaean

The deepest layer of crust, only still extant in rare relict shards that avoided subduction into the mantle. Here the first biological life nucleated around a crystal of unearthly origin, and here it still remains: an undying clonal colony persisting as a protoplasmic ooze, the blood of the Earth itself.

Hadean

The upper mantle, named for the period of Earths’ early history in which it had not yet cooled from its creation. Floating within the magma, giant geode cities are inhabited by primordial crystal creatures, the Hekaton, encased in a rocky prison that later became the Earth. Their bodies naturally generate flux, which they use to sculpt their environments.