King Tare

I stepped through the portal and suddenly I was surrounded by an arc of stone effigies, ending with King Tare, the last of his line.

The preservation techniques were primitive, but amazingly effective. Bodies had been coated with a sap which hardened to form a crystalline shell. Decomposition became an almost geologic process. At first there had been a wild hope of finding genetic material that could be sequenced and studied. The genetics community stirred itself into a frenzy, but had to settle for disappointment.

Except for me. It was my unusual background that let me see what the others couldn't. I was an inorganic chemist until mid-career when I switched to genetics. Who would ever have thought there would be a connection? No one on Earth.

As it turns out, iridium compounds have a fascinating chemistry that is complementary to that of RNA. Iridium complexes with an appropriate structure can efficiently catalyze the assembly of simple organic organisms—viruses, microbes—from scratch. It was one of my students who coined the term 'meta-virus' for the iridium compounds we extracted from the preserved bodies.

No one seriously studied inorganic biologies. There was no mechanism for evolutionary change. The origin of the iridium meta-virus might have stumped me, except the solution was as obvious as it was disconcerting: intelligent design.

The geologists who found the tomb had been studying the K-T boundary, marked by a global layer of iridium deposited by an asteroid impact. The K-T boundary takes its name from the epochal transition from the Cretaceous to the Tertiary period—when dinosaurs vanished. It seemed only fitting that the phonetic alphabet yield up the name 'King Tare' to the final ruler of a bipedal sauropod species, wiped out by an iridium meta-virus, sixty-five million years ago.