A Flickering Light

It has been close to a year since I knocked on the door of the British consulate at Tenerife and mumbled some story about losing my passport after a night drinking. I'm not sure what led me to lie that day. The police officer I first accosted spoke very little English, so I played the drunken tourist routine to save time. By the time I reached the consulate I guess I just wanted it all to end. Since then, I had been unable to set the record straight. Many times I tried drafting a police report, but when it came to describing the nature of the crime I drew a blank. Oh to be sure, crimes had been committed, and very unpleasant crimes at that. Enough, if proven in a court of law, to put the culprit away for a very long time. Yet on paper they all seemed so petty. Certainly nothing that could lead me to denounce a man who had once considered me his friend. Whereas the crime, the grave offence that sent my moral compass spinning, could very well pass uncondemned before the law.

Yet all the same I cannot keep silent about the work of Florian Meier. What I saw was so extraordinary, with such far reaching repercussions for the history of our species, that even without the moral issues at play, the world must know. As for these moral issues, well. What I cannot submit to the law I present to the common judgment of humanity; where I cannot condemn I will at least testify.

It was an accident of fate that I met Florian. I posted an unfavourable review of Austen's Emma on a literature forum, and woke up the next day to find a lengthy reply explaining in great detail every point on which I was wrong. I did not take the criticism well, and the conversation turned sour. It was an inauspicious beginning, and I don't know what led us to exchange contact details at the end of it. On my end, I guess he did such a good job of proving me an idiot that I couldn't hold it against him. As for Florian, it seems that he just needed someone to talk to. And he talked a lot. About anything and everything. There was no thing under heaven that Florian did not have an opinion on and, once I got over the initial unpleasantness of our meeting, I had to concede that those opinions were eminently sensible. Rarely did I leave our sessions without the feeling that I was wrong and he was right, in the broad strokes if not in the details.

It took a while for me to note this as odd. I administer a server, and in my line of work I waste a lot of my days online. There are many savants on the internet. Strange creatures full of more facts than Wikipedia, yet whose lives consist in lurking in the dark corners of the web. But eventually I had to concede that Florian was different. Though I did not yet see him as the greatest mind of our generation, it was clear that I was dealing with a very, very capable man. Moreover, he had the most banal of proofs on his side: wealth. He ran some sort of computing cluster, and would often ask for my advice on hardware purchases. These were far from cheap. Over the years of our acquaintance the costs ran into the hundreds of thousands. When I brought up the topic of his seemingly inexhaustible funds, he laughed and complained about the hassle involved with setting up a reliable internet connection on a private island. I later found out he was not joking.

I grew fascinated. I wanted to know more about him. But Florian Meier was the one subject the man seemed to have nothing to say about. It was not easy to ferret anything out. All I had was two common German names, and a couple of online identities. But it's hard to stay anonymous in a world where everything is public record. I knew that somewhere in the megabytes of text the man had left on various websites lay a clue to his identity. It was a haystack, but I had time. And a text-parser. The key turned out counting place names. Top of the list were of course the Tokyos, Londons, and New Yorks of the world -- those tend to pop up in any conversation -- but following that was something more interesting. Dortmund, Essen, Düsseldorf. Why on Earth would anyone discuss miserable industrial towns in the Rhineland, unless one actually lived there? I called up the context of the words, and my suspicions were confirmed. He was describing streets and environs, giving directions and dining suggestions. This was obviously a part of the world that he knew intimately, and it allowed me to narrow my search.