Day 12: My Friend the Brachiosaurus
Silly me. I’d forgotten about the oscillation overthruster that the Banzai Institute, led by the inestimable Buckaroo Banzai, had loaned to me before I set out on my journey. The Institute is a very difficult organization to find, and most people who have heard of it have only heard of it through the 1984 documentary The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. You can Google the Institute, of course, but you’ll only pull up fakes and people who claim to belong to the Institute, but are only pretenders and phonies. Does the Banzai Institute really exist? Of course it does. The book The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Versus the World Crime League may be less-than-perfectly written, but it is a good attempt at journalistic nonfiction. In general, you do not contact the Banzai Institute. They contact you.
So when I announced to the world that I was going to hop back in time with a flux capacitor that had been loaned to me, the Institute reached out. The adventures of Doc Brown and his student Marty McFly have been well documented in the Back to the Future trilogy of documentaries, but the Institute was well aware of the unreliability of the capacitor. Doctor Banzai himself was interested in the adventures I might have in the prehistoric eras of Earth’s history, so he offered to loan me the oscillation overthruster. The overthruster is typically used to travel between dimensions, of course. But with a little tinkering and some serious conversations with it I was able to convince it that since time is a dimension (see Einstein et. al.), it could travel through time as well, if hooked up properly to your travel device.
At any rate, after all that, I wound up in the late Jurassic Period, approximately 154 million years before the modern day. Yes, the same Jurassic Period that Jurassic Park in the (fictional) novel and movie was named after. Fun fact, though; the tyrannosaurus did not live in the Jurassic Period. In fact, they are actually closer to the modern day than they are to the Jurassic Period. Mind blown, right?
Anyway, here’s the brachiosaurus I encountered:
It looks small, but that’s only because the table is occupied was SO BIG! Now, fossils show that the brachiosaurus, though huge and heavy and what-not, only had a brain about the size of a walnut, and a large set of neuronal ganglia in the tip of its tail which many people have falsely assumed was a second brain. However, this brain was extraordinarily well-developed, and the brachiosaurus and I had a lovely conversation about life, the universe, and everything. She communicated primarily in grunts and belches and took many breaks to munch on leaves (like most dinosaurs, the brachiosaurus was an herbivore), but the little fish in my ear translated everything perfectly.
The brachiosaurus gave me some tips for fixing the flux capacitor and tuning it to the same frequency as the oscillation overthruster and suggested how to get home. It may require a complicated journey and I should take care not to create any paradoxes, but I should be back home for Christmas! I’m relieved and thrilled. Cats, I’m coming home!