The Time of the Titans

Prologue: The River

Dedicated to the ones with whom I shared strange worlds with when they were kids, and the ones who still are, and the ones who never ceased to be.

*  *  *

The way I remembered the last day of my life, it was rainy and grey. Autumn had taken over, painting the landscape with shades of brown, yet we were still a way ahead of winter. Throughout that afternoon, there had been drizzle, which rendered the cobblestone streets of our university town slippery. I was cycling those streets, as I used to, on my way from Professor Landorf's lecture to my modest flat. I was speeding, faster than I should have, because those days, my head was full of Helena. She filled my heart, thrilled my brain and whirred my soul. Helena would stay longer at the Institute. I hurried home – to prepare a surprise dinner for her. Oh well.

For the unlikely event that a living soul in the aftermath will find and read my story, let me explain that my relationship with Helena was like an innocent schoolboy's first crush with an older girl. Or indeed with a pretty teacher. That's how I felt about Helena for some time. She was several years my senior and far more advanced academically. She had defended her dissertation a couple of years before we started dating, and had promptly earned a permanent position at the Institute.

Helena became an important fellow in Landorf's Human Renaissance Programme, the flagship of the Institute he headed. She had been an avid admirer of the man for quite some time – in academic sense, of course, though I had to admit that also in spirit. That was no wonder, given who Professor Landorf was. I had been his student even before I met Helena, but through her, I came to share also the dream they worked on. The idea of a better future for mankind brought us together and later held us together. Science and idealism became one. Science was the vessel to deliver us to a better future. Many an outsider, back then, considered us utopians.

I was so completely sunken in my thoughts about Helena and saving the world that I paid little attention on the grey and damp state of our town. I recall the leaves of poplar trees falling and floating in the wind.

Helena had not felt at home in the Faculty of Psychology where her scientist's career had started. She gained no support there for certain experiments she sought to run in order to apply the findings of Landorf's line of research to mainstream psychology – instead, she evoke criticism from the more conventional practitioners of the field. Yet it was common in the polemics of that period that the critiques of Landorf or Helena just earned them both more fame.

Although Helena introduced me to Landorf's programme, I never gave up pursuing my own, rather modest aspirations on the field of pedagogy – which at the time seemed more practical to me. Yet over the months my interest towards Landorf's work expanded from Helena to the entire programme. It impressed me deeply, and I realized what Helena had seen in the professor. Though that was just the beginning.

I assume that Xavier Landorf's name would later become famous worldwide, but he had begun to reap fame back in those days already. His dedicated disciples consisted of both graduates and undergrads as well as followers of the more popularized concepts of his work in various fields. His short webinars – characterized by development optimism and humanistic warmth – gained at their best millions of views. His online fame, in turn, attracted handsome interest from academically more obscure but apparently deep-pocketed patrons. A scientist, an artist, a philanthropist and an incurable romantic – all that and more, Professor Landorf was. A polymath and a genius of his time, yet never blind at the simple joys of human nature and good life. He was always stimulating to listen to, and pleasant company.

Landorf was well into his fifties at the time but still a rather handsome man. His face was expressive and soulful, eyebrows strong, and his once dark hair turned decorously grey on temples, in sync with a grey stripe in the middle of his otherwise dark beard. Our professor's choices of clothing tended to reflect some gentlemanly times of the past rather than the future he usually dreamed and lectured about. Landorf was renowned for his magical charm in the auditorium, which furthered his increasing status as a guru of his somewhat unconventional cross-faculty scene. By fluently lecturing in half a dozen languages, he had internationalized his following until it was a worldwide virtual community. Those days, the Institute, too, began to constitute a real Babel, reaching for the skies.