What if we all experience time in the same chronology?

Meat. Naught but meat. Gazelles who turn around themselves searching for a purpose that isn't there. They spend their days obsessing over themselves, for they are their own perceived world. They sense the lion - an intruder in their conscious environ - and they escape into the dunes that envelop the oasis.

The lion simply waits, taking the chance that his meat may reason that it will die out in the dry sands if it does not return for the precious water and vegetation - the meat of the meat - that it needs to live.

Ice cold wind, one pure adjective of this desert, does not provide relief, or shelter, or sustenance. The meat performs some sickening form of cryptozoology upon the ragged, fiery dunes. It discovers that which it did not believe could truly exist: A way of sustaining life on a long, dry journey through this arid world. A thing of legend living beneath the sands. The meat creates a way to fashion itself shelter from this wicked environ. The meat lives on.

Meat of the meat is not enough for the lion. It is one link in the chain, and it cannot skip the next step down. The vegetation can sustain the meat, and the meat can sustain the lion, but the vegetation does nothing for the lion. A simple, efficient machine would have been impossible to build in this existence, and instead, complexity reigns. One piece of the chain falls, and the rest must adapt. If too many pieces fall, the machine chokes, sputters, and dies, and life ends.

The lion ends. The meat finds a place in another chain. One machine traded for another.