Williams Residence, Manhattan Suburbs, Late July 1985
Alex collapsed onto his race car bed, the mattress springs groaning in protest under his slight frame, as if the little red Corvette decal on the headboard had just taken a sharp corner too fast. The room's late-afternoon light filtered through half-drawn blinds, painting golden bars across the ceiling's faint water stains—remnants of last winter's leaks. He stared up at them, chest rising and falling in the humid hush, Stuart's earlier purr still echoing in his ears like a fading engine hum. But his mind? It revved at full throttle, circuits firing with the relentless precision of the computer system, unspooling timelines and contingencies faster than any 8-bit processor.
Blue Star Interactive. The name alone sent a thrill through him, a spark in the garage gloom that could ignite an empire. For now, survival meant playing smart: third-party developer, churning out killer titles to prop up SEGA's Mark III like Atlas holding the sky. Build a library that moved units—'Zelda' as the crown, 'Contra' as the cannon fodder, 'Final Fantasy' and 'Street Fighter' as the velvet hammers. Each one a preempted legend, yanking these masterpieces from the future's grasp to flood '85's arcades and shelves. Capital would follow: royalties stacking like gold bricks, team swelling from three dreamers to thirty, then fifty. Only then, with coffers brimming, could they pivot—prototyping their own hardware, a console that blended SEGA's edge with Nintendo's soul, sidestepping the '90s pitfalls he knew by heart: Sega's hubris, Sony's late bloom, Microsoft's lumbering entry.
But the path was a tightrope, strung taut over the chasm of their ages. All these need enough capital. Shoud he go for more lottery wins? Tempting—those Powerball precursors were child's play with his foreknowledge, a few "lucky" tickets netting millions without a whisper of suspicion. Betting on sports? The '85 Bears' Super Bowl romp, Villanova's hoops miracle—easy marks, but the spotlight? A kid flashing cash at tracks or OTB parlors screamed fraud, or worse, pity. His parents would shut it down faster than a you can say go.
Stocks, though—that was the slow-burn rocket fuel. He'd gauged the winds already: casual dinner probes about "market trends," dropping hints of Apple's IPO surge or Microsoft's quiet ascent. His father was warming, his ledgers itching for diversification after years of nickel-and-diming through recessions. But his mother? She was the firewall, her skepticism rooted in soil too freshly tilled from lean cupboards and mended hems. "We've only just caught our breath, Alex," she'd say, her voice a mix of caution and that unshakeable maternal steel.
They weren't hurting anymore—not with lottery winnings —but pushing too hard could crack the fragile peace. 'Patience,' he reminded himself, fingers drumming the bedspread. 'Zelda' drops in August; the royalties would hit like a tsunami by fall. That flood would wash away hesitations, turning family dinners into portfolio reviews. Which actually sounded bad when he thought about it that.
"I need an extra source," Alex muttered to the empty room, his voice swallowed by the whir of the ceiling fan. Game dev ate his prime hours—prototyping, playtesting, and his own chores: trash runs and lawn edges that barely dented his bandwidth. With a full month before first days at a normal elementary school's clamped down, Alex already had the entire curriculum in his head so basically he was just going their to make friends. There was nothing for him to stress about it if better for him to skip a few grades, that way he'd be in the same school as Michael and Mark.
'But the question was what to fill his free time with?' His mind hummed possibilities: inventions to patent, a neighborhood newsletter turned empire. But doors for a kid in '85 were narrow—internet a DARPA dream, no Etsy or YouTube to democratize hustle. Acting? He could channel a young Spielberg, but auditions meant spotlights he wasn't wired for. Music? Nah, that could wait until he was older.
"Hmm... maybe I should write a book?" The idea landed like a power-up, simple yet seismic. Words on paper—timeless, simple. No age gates, just ink and imagination. The more he turned it over, the brighter it burned: his future vault spilling plots like contraband, ripe for the plucking. Sci-fi epics, thrillers laced with tech prophecies—bestsellers that could bankroll Blue Star's next wing without a single quarter wagered.
"Alright, writing it is. Now, what?" Options cascaded: cyberpunk heists echoing Gibson's neuromantic haze, space operas predating 'Star Trek's sequels. But era mattered—'85's pulse thrummed with Cold War jitters and Spielberg wonder, Spielberg's 'E.T' still fresh,'Gremlins' was in theaters. He scanned the room for a muse: Star Wars X-wings dogfighting on the wall, a Rubik's Cube half-solved on the nightstand, his gaze snagging on the T-Rex figure perched on the shelf—a plastic behemoth from his last shopping spring, its tiny arms frozen in futile roar.
A grin cracked his face, electric and inevitable. Yes.Dinosaurs. Chaos in the Jurassic, biotech hubris gone feral. Without another thought, he vaulted off the bed, sneakers thumping the hardwood as he bolted downstairs, his mind already outlining acts: amber mosquitoes, ethical quagmires, a park where wonder devours wonder.
The living room enveloped him in domestic warmth—flickering TV glow bathing the sofa in Jaws' blue undertow, the scent of buttered popcorn mingling with Martha's contraband Pringles stash. There she lounged, feet tucked under a throw blanket, devouring a can of cookies with the single-minded glee of a critic at a premiere. It was her ritual, harmless as a secret vice—midweek indulgences when Romancing the Stone or Out of Africa reeled her in, crumbs dusting her lap like grains of sand. Oliver sat beside her, a quiet as ever, his fingers tracing lazy circles on Stuart's ebony fur as the cat dozed in a sunbeam, purring softly. The screen's shark-fin slice drew Martha's running commentary—"Oh, that Brody's such a fool, isn't he, Baby? If only he'd listened to Hooper!"—her voice a lively underscore to the tension.
Note to self: be cautious about movie nights with Mom, Alex thought, suppressing a chuckle at the avalanche of plot spoilers she'd unleash. He sidled up to the sofa, leaning over his dad's shoulder, the faint cedar of Oliver's aftershave filling his nose.
Alex paused for a minute at the slightly unfamiliar face, he couldn't recall seeing his dad without his beard. Oliver looked at least tens years younger without the beard.
"Hey, Dad—I've got a question." Alex's asked after regaining his sense, free hand darted toward the cookie tin, a stealth raid foiled by Martha's hawk-eyed swat, her focus unbroken even as she murmured, "Not before dinner, young man."
Oliver arched a brow, amusement flickering in his eyes as he lowered the volume. "Yes?"
"Do we still have the old typewriter? And if so... where's it stashed?"
Oliver paused, the cog's in his mind spinning. "We do. Basement, probably in one of those labeled bins from when we move."
"Got it—thanks!" Alex beamed, rubbing his stinging knuckles with mock drama before pivoting toward the cellar door.
"Alex, you be careful down there," Martha called, half-turning, a cookie poised mid-bite. "No tumbling into spiderwebs or knocking over holiday totes!"
"Yes, Mother," he echoed, voice laced with affectionate exaggeration, the door creaking shut behind him.
The basement was a time capsule of organized entropy: fluorescent buzz overhead, shelves groaning under bins of '78 tax returns and orphaned Christmas lights. Alex waded through the gloom, flashlight beam slicing cardboard tombs until he unearthed the prize—a battered Underwood, keys yellowed but unyielding, nestled in a box of faded report cards. He hefted it upstairs with a grunt, the metallic tang of old ink greeting him like a prodigal's welcome. Back in his room, he cleared the desk with a sweep—pushing aside graph paper scribbles of Contra's enemy waves—wiping down the platen with a rag until it gleamed. A fresh ream of A4 paper, pilfered from Oliver's study, thumped onto the surface.
Plopping into the creaky desk chair, Alex closed his eyes, His mind an archive unfurling like a velociraptor's claw: Crichton's blueprint, but amplified—sharper twists, deeper dread, ethics laced with '80s biotech buzz. The title crowned the first sheet in block capitals:JURASSIC PARK. What to tweak? Amp the chaos: a rogue raptor pack earlier, Hammond's hubris laced with Cold War paranoia, a nod to genetic arms races that'd make Pentagon suits sweat. Five minutes of crystalline focus, and his fingers ignited—dancing across the keys in a staccato rhythm, thoughts pouring molten onto the page. The prologue took shape: a mosquito in amber, a billionaire's folly, the first tremor of scales on skin.
Outside, the sun dipped lower, but in Alex's world, eras collided—'85's ink meeting '90's roar. Blue Star's empire would rise on code and cash, but this? This was the wildcard, a literary meteor hurtling toward bestseller lists, funding dreams with the fury of a T-Rex charge. Stuart hopped onto the desk, batting at a stray ribbon of paper, oblivious to the boy rewriting tomorrow, one keystroke at a time.
The Underwood's keys clacked like distant gunfire under Alex's fingertips, each strike a small rebellion against the blank page's tyranny. The first sheet fed through smooth, the platen's ratchet advancing with mechanical promise, and the words spilled out—prose honed sharp by the vast, unbidden library in his mind. Not a machine's hum, no implanted circuits or alien glow; just knowledge, vast and vertiginous, a mental archive of timelines past and futures unwritten.
History's footnotes, science's revisions, culture's echoes—all at his command, summoned like ghosts to reshape the tale. Jurassic Park. Crichton's blueprint burned bright in his recall: a 1990 thunderbolt, blending Jaws' dread with biotech hubris, a cautionary thriller that would spawn blockbusters and boardroom debates. But Alex knew its seams—the plot's pulse, yes, but also the cracks where '90s paleontology would pry open truths buried in the fossil record.
He paused at the end of the prologue, the mosquito in amber trapped eternal on the page, its belly swollen with tyrannosaur blood. In the original, it hooked you fast: InGen's secretive isle off Costa Rica, John Hammond's visionary folly birthing a theme park from prehistoric DNA. The ensemble cast—mathematician Ian Malcolm's chaos theory barbs, paleontologist Alan Grant's reluctant awe, Ellie Sattler's botanical grit, the kids Tim and Lex as wide-eyed bait.
The inciting spark: a worker mauled by a "procompsagnathus" on the mainland, then the VIP tour—Hammond's grand reveal of electric-fenced paddocks teeming with revived giants. Velociraptors scheming in their pens, a T. rex rampage in the storm, the park's systems crumbling under Murphy's law. Betrayal from chief programmer Nedry, dino escapes turning paradise to purgatory, a desperate trek through jungles thick with peril. Climax in the control room, raptors at the glass, Grant's clever-girl quip echoing as he jury-rigged survival. Epilogue: Hammond's broken dreams, Malcolm's "life finds a way" coda, the island a quarantined scar.
It was taut, terrifying—a techno-thriller dissecting '80s excess, corporate overreach, and nature's indomitable code. Spielberg's '93 film would amp the spectacle: glossy effects, Sam Neill's rumpled heroism, gold-framed glasses glinting in dino jaws. But Alex's archive whispered corrections, drawn from decades of digs and debates. The dinosaurs? Romanticized relics, sculpted by '80s speculation now fossilized as myth. Velociraptors, those pack-hunting stars, weren't the 6-foot terrors Crichton conjured from Deinonychus proxies—no, true Velociraptor mongoliensis clocked in at turkey-sized, 6 feet long but knee-high to a man, feathered phantoms of the Gobi, not the sleek, scaly kill-machines of Isla Nublar.
Feathers: a revelation post-Park, iridescent plumes on microraptors and even T. rex kin, turning reptilian roarers into avian specters. Behaviors skewed too: compies as cute scavengers? More like opportunistic omnivores, not Disney villains. T. rex's vision? "Couldn't see you if you didn't move"? Bunk—keen binocular sight, a predator's laser focus. And the resurrection? Frog DNA for gaps was clever fiction, but real gaps yawned wider: no viable proteins from amber-trapped blood, collagen decay too swift for viable sequencing. Later genomes would demand bird-branch tweaks, not amphibian hacks.
Alex leaned back, the chair's wicker creaking, Stuart's tail flicking against his ankle like a metronome urging him on. Fix it, the knowledge demanded. Make it sing true. He rolled in a fresh sheet, fingers resuming their dance, weaving revisions seamless as scar tissue. The raptors shrank—Velociraptor proper, yes, but cunning in flocks, their iridescent quills rustling like wind through grass, sickle claws silent on volcanic soil.
No oversized Deinonychus stand-ins; instead, he amplified the threat with numbers, a feathered phalanx swarming low, beaks and talons a whirlwind blur. Compies became sly opportunists, nipping at heels in the underbrush, their "proleptic" curiosity laced with calculated risk—scavengers testing the wounded, not mindless hordes. T. rex's hunt sharpened: eyes like twin spotlights, tracking heat and motion through rain-lashed ferns, its bellow a subsonic thunder that rattled ribs.
But he didn't stop at science's scalpel; the story demanded his forge. Crichton's park was a '80s parable—Reaganomics hubris, biotech's wild west—but Alex layered '85's undercurrents: Cold War paranoia threading Hammond's boardroom, whispers of Soviet gene labs racing InGen's monopoly. Malcolm's chaos? Deeper dives into fractals, with Grant sketching self-similar coastlines on napkins, bridging paleontology and unpredictability. Ellie got steel: not just the green-thumb sidekick, but a molecular biologist probing the DNA gaps, her suspicions igniting the plot's fuse—ethical qualms over chimeric ethics, avian tweaks birthing unforeseen behaviors. The kids? Less cipher, more catalyst: Tim, the dino-obsessed tinkerer, hotwiring jeeps with jury-rigged smarts; Lex, budding hacker, cracking Nedry's sabotage with '80s proto-coding flair. Hammond? No mere mogul— a faded dreamer, his monologues laced with regret, quoting Oppenheimer's "destroyer of worlds" amid the paddock glow.
As the second page filled— the mainland attack, a worker's scream swallowed by compy chirps—Alex's revisions breathed life anew. Pacing tightened: shorter chapters, cliffhangers like raptor shadows on glass. Themes amplified— not just "life finds a way," but "we rewrite the code, and it rewrites us," ethics laced with foresight of CRISPR dawns and de-extinction debates. He cut fat: Nedry's comic bumbling became cold opportunism, his betrayal a mirror to InGen's greed. Sensory depth surged: the park's humid reek of ferns and ozone, the electric hum of fences underscoring human fragility, the wet snap of bone under claw.
The sun dipped toward the horizon, casting the room in amber twilight that mirrored his tale's trapped heart. Sheets piled like unearthed strata—five pages now, the tour commencing, Hammond's voice booming with aged zeal: "Welcome... to Jurassic Park." Stuart hopped onto the desk, batting a curling edge, her curiosity a purr of approval. Alex stretched, knuckles popping, the archive's weight a comfortable mantle. This wasn't plagiarism; it was evolution— Crichton's skeleton fleshed with truths unborn, a bestseller primed to jolt '85's shelves. Royalties would flow like lava, funding Blue Star's ascent, turning garage sparks to silicon empires. But deeper, it was catharsis: a boy's mind, library vast, authoring tomorrows one keystroke at a time.
Downstairs, Martha's movie laughter bubbled up, a reminder of the world's simpler rhythms. Alex smiled, feeding in another sheet. The T. rex loomed next—feathers subtle, a proto-bird's ruff framing jaws that hungered for more than flesh. 'Life finds a way, he typed, Malcolm's line twisted just so. And so do we.'