Felix Matzinger once described his life in Austria as “fairly unremarkable, though far from uninteresting”; certainly being Salzburg’s local darling has come with its own set of distinct privileges, but his modest charms follow him wherever he travels. He managed to capture the attention of the Italian playboy Gianni Cafaro on his first trip to Florence, now they summer together as an annual tradition.

Felix lives in the shadow of the Untersberg, which he treats less as a famous landmark and more as his own backyard. It was upon the forested slopes of the mountain that he one night discovered a scattering of strange machine parts, which he collected and began quietly reassembling. The technology itself was unrecognizable and any traces of code he found therein were completely foreign; but for months he kept it a complete secret while he taught himself its forms and functions. Almost a year later, he had developed an ocular scanner that allowed him to translate large sections of the foreign code, which he nicknamed “K1-Rosaic [Kode 1- Rosenkode]” as he found references in the its signature to a word which loosely translated to “pink”, or so he assumed. Eventually, he was able to reassemble the machine, which took the form of a large stag. Though he was able to rework most of its programming so that its behaviors were lifelike, the mechanical beast still showed occasional malfunctions or system errors. Still, Felix never completely lost patience and named it Eisenherz, treating it as his own companion and continuing to learn as much as he could from the technology. Increasingly he began to suspect that the original construct was not built by humans.