Solnhofen, Bavaria, 2022
I. The Misfit
The afternoon in Solnhofen was stifling and still. Sunlight fell like melted honey, setting the surface of the lagoon aglow with an oily shimmer. The humid air carried clouds of pollen shed from gymnosperm cones. A squadron of ancient dragonflies buzzed low over Rocco's head like a formation of miniature fighter jets, casting ghost-pale reflections across the water.
Rocco had little interest in the delivery they represented.
Right now, this archaeopteryx sat with his head cocked, hiding furtively in the enormous fronds of a cycad at the water's edge, his amber eyes fixed on a compsognathus dozing on the shallows — its tail curled downward, twitching now and then, tempting as a strip of meat left out to cure.
Rocco always looked hungry. Unlike the rest of his kind, he couldn't rely on the era's largest flight feathers to glide and hunt with the same quick efficiency.
This prehistoric creature, infected with something called the AZ1 virus, looked strange even among his own kind. No feathers had grown across his body — only a thin membrane of skin in their place. His wingspan was enormous, his forelimbs thick and clumsy. He could fly, yes, but every flight cost him dearly, burning through energy he could barely spare. Rocco needed enormous quantities of food to survive — and in a forest this dangerous, that was never a good sign.
Rocco had understood, from very early on, that as a misfit he was playing an entirely different game from the rest of his kind, even sharing the same forest. If he lived at the same unhurried pace they did, he would certainly die. His body demanded the hunting efficiency of an apex predator; without it, every day he grew only brought him closer to the end. Even his mother had once told him, without any comfort to offer, that this was the curse the AZ1 virus had left him with. He was no longer a dinosaur. And he would never become a true bird, the way the rest of his kind would.
He would have to find his own way to survive — his only chance of living through the catastrophe that was, by now, all but certain.
II. The Rain
The rain came, in the end.
At first it was only scattered drops, heavy and slow, as though the sky could no longer carry some ancient grief. One of the last survivors of his kind, Rocco crouched alone now at the edge of the sealed lagoon, beneath a stand of cycads, his soaked wings folded close against his body. He felt no warmth in them at all.
This rain belonged only to the Jurassic — carrying the weight of a primeval atmosphere not yet fully settled into itself. Each drop fell almost straight down, striking the cycad fronds with a dull, heavy thud, as if time itself had begun to slow.
The rain was too cold.
In the distance, a wall of volcanic ash advanced on the jungle, silent and unhurried. Ash mixed with rainwater fell across the land, spreading a pale film over the surface of the lake.
Rocco remembered his mother telling him, when he was small, that volcanic ash was the earth's way of forgetting things. Only now did he understand: this lagoon, this jungle, and he himself, would all be forgotten in the same way.
If he could wake again, someday, in some other form, he hoped he would remember this — his home, and this one rainy day in the Jurassic.
Rocco swung his neck side to side, spread his enormous wings, and, exactly as he had planned, flew with everything he had toward the center of the lagoon.
III. The Boy's Code
Before that summer arrived, a small boy typed the AZ1 virus code into his handheld game console.
The virus quickly infected a newly hatched archaeopteryx — the first individual of its kind to evolve in an entirely different direction.
As the rest of his kind evolved further toward true birds, their bones hollowed out, their wings lifted easily above their backs. They grew nimbler, gained greater endurance, and flew with less and less wasted effort.
The misfit walked an entirely different path, alone. The deformity in his body demanded enormous power output; he had no choice but to optimize for raw force instead of efficiency. Day after day, through hunt after hunt — both the successful ones and the failures — his keel and pectoral muscles pushed further and further forward. His lung capacity and air sacs grew larger and larger.
His respiratory system grew steadily more extreme, until his entire chest cavity had become something closer to an engine. With every breath, he converted enormous quantities of oxygen into far more energy than his body could ever need — and that surplus, mixed with gas, came roaring back out of him as fire.
This reptile, who wanted the sky just as badly as any of his kind, never became a bird. Instead, he became the first dragon the sky had ever seen.
With a string of code, the boy had created a glitch that was never meant to exist in that world. That summer, the glitch defeated everyone above him on the planet's food chain. Legends of an evil dragon began to spread, and armored warriors and heroes came from every corner of the world to seek him out — competing against one another, even, for the honor of taking his head.
The glitch never once retreated.
When the summer ended, he was sealed away — along with all those endless battles — inside an 8-bit microprocessor, coupled to a palm-sized monochrome LCD screen.
IV. The Paleontologist
Writing these words feels like writing his own memoir.
The distant dream feels like memory. Or perhaps it's the opposite — perhaps the Jurassic rainy season is so familiar to him that, after all this time, it has simply turned into a dream instead.
The paleontologist set down his pen and sat for a long time, looking at the archaeopteryx specimen in front of him — cataloged, numbered, resting inside a slab of limestone a meter and a half long, asleep for a hundred and fifty million years.
This was a secret only he knew.
He typed out the second segment of the AZ1 code, letter by letter. When he finished, he stood up and saw that the rain outside had stopped at some point without his noticing.
Berlin's summer rain always arrived and left like this — sudden, thunderous, without warning.
The paleontologist left the museum at a brisk pace, and set out on a journey to Cusco.
