Die Menschen sind nicht immer, was sie scheinen, aber selten etwas besseres.

(People are not always what they appear, but rarely are they better.)

- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Travelling in the time machine, I have gone to the bottom of the ocean, visited the dinosaurs and met a man who is immortal. And that's not even the full list. I thought small things would no longer surprise me. I was of course wrong. I should get used to that.

As I entered Mr Tuniak's office today, the big surprise was the simple fact that he was not alone there. As usual he was sitting behind his desk, facing the door, but at the sofa, where I was often sitting, there was a woman. She was about forty years old, wore her dark, shoulder length hair open and had clothing that looked as if they came from the 50ies. She also came from that time, as Mr Tuniak explained.

“May I introduce Elisa Debarou”, he said.

“Nice to meet you.” I saw that there were several papers lying on the table in front of her. They were print-outs of my previous blog entries, as I could recognise very quickly when I saw the headings.

“You have heard the story of my life from only one point of view, so far”, Mr Tuniak said. “I thought it would be a good idea to get... a second opinion, so to speak. Especially now, as we are talking about the time when... when I was trying to change history. I don't mean to say that I have withheld facts from you or tried to paint myself in a better light, but... It is a fact that we... we humans cannot trust our brains one hundred percent. We change our memories, unconsciously most of the time, but we change them none the less. Especially about things we don't want to remember any way.”

“M. Tuniak is worried that his dark side is not getting it's due”, Madame Debarou said with a small smile. She pointed at the papers on the table. “And I am here today to bring out his dark deeds.” She was still smiling, as if the idea that Mr Tuniak could even have a dark side amused her.

“Where and when did you first meet Mr Tuniak?”, I asked.

“In Belgium, about two years after the First World War”, she answered.

“I should maybe explain one thing first”, Mr Tuniak interjected. “When Alice and I first started changing history, we made sure to have precise records of all the places we visited, how history went down originally, what we changed and what the results were. Very quickly we got quite a huge amount of data that way. We worked with the computer of the time machine, but it still got very confusing very quickly. We needed someone who could sort through all the data, bring it in some kind of order... Maybe look things up for us from time to time.”

“That became my job”, Mme Debarou said. “In a way, I was their accountant.”

Mr Tuniak stood up from his place and went to the door. “You know the basics”, he said to me. “She will now tell you the rest.”

After Mr Tuniak had left the office and closed the door behind himself, Mme Debarou turned to me, still with a smile. “Now about the shadow side of his life”, she said. “I've read everything you have written about Alexander until now. And I can tell you that you two were very thorough. He didn't leave out anything of importance. I'm pretty sure that he thinks of his... younger self much worse than he actually was. But you are presenting him quite well... maybe a bit more reserved and milder than he really was. But I can understand that. You didn't know him back then and you are projecting his present self back on his younger self.”

She is most probably right. Mr Tuniak has mentioned from time to time that his younger self thought he was cleverer than he actually was and didn't often take the opinion of others into account. And because he was a time traveller he often did have access to information no none else had which gave him more knowledge and made it hard for him to admit it when he did not have all the answers.

“Tell me about your first meeting with Mr Tuniak”, I said. “What was your first impression?”

“The first time I met him was, as I said, in Belgium. I was working at the Mundaneum then”, Mme Debarou answered.

“What was that?”

“The Mundaneum? You call it the father of the modern internet search engines”, she explained. “It was founded by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine. They wanted to collect the whole of human knowledge, index it and make it accessible for everyone who wanted it. People from all over the world could send in questions and we would look up the answers.”

“That was shortly after the First World War?”, I asked. “How was that possible?”

“With telegrams and letters, of course”, Mme Debarou said, obviously amused by my incredulity. “You should have seen Otlet's future plans for the Mundaneum. He practically predicted your modern internet lexika.”

“And what exactly was your job there?”

“I searched for the answers. Imagine a huge archive where all the information is written on small, little index cards. My job was to find the right card that had the required answer written on it.”

The day's shift was over. Elisa Debarou switched off the light on her desk and started to leave. As usual, she was the last one in the building. But contrary to her colleagues, she had no real home she would return to in the evening. The other women would go to their families or husbands, but Elisa lived alone in a small one room apartment. Alone with her nightmares.

Elisa was born with a perfect memory. She remember details even years after events had happened. It was very useful for her job, of course. Several times M. Otlet had praised her work and she was quicker in finding information than all of her colleagues. But for the same reason, her memory was also a curse. It would not let her forget the horrors she had seen during the Great War.

“Mademoiselle Debarou, would you please come up for a moment!”, M. Otlet shouted.

When Elisa was entering his office, she saw that M. Otlet was not alone. Another man, younger than him, was sitting in a chair. She was sure that she had never seen him before.

“Mademoiselle Debarou, this is Monsieur Tuniak”, M. Otlet introduced the man, who greeted her politely. Elisa saw immediately the contrast in body language between the two men. M. Otlet was obviously not glad to see his visitor. He only looked at the young man for short moments and acted as if he would be happier if the newcomer would disappear into thin air. M. Tuniak on the other hand, looked as if he owned not only this office, but the whole building. No, not only the building, the whole world.

“M. Tuniak wants you to quit your job here and work for him”, M. Otlet explained.

“I want you to come and work for my archive”, Moniseur Tuniak said. “But it's better if we discuss this somewhere else, not here. I know that you have no plans for this evening, so I'd like to invite you to a little dinner with... my partner and me.”

“I... I don't know...”, Elisa stammered, overwhelmed by the unexpected offer.

“M. Otlet won't object”, M. Tuniak assured her. “You will of course be missed here, a lot, but if you weren't the best, I wouldn't offer you this position. Come!”

“Right now?”

“No time like the present.” He turned to M. Otlet. “I will make sure that the donation will be on your desk tomorrow morning.”

“So, Mr Tuniak donated money to the Mundaneum so that M. Otlet would be willing to let you go?”, I asked.

“Yes”, Mme Debarou said. “And M. Otlet didn't really have a choice in the matter. He had to take the money, because that was the one thing the Mundaneum was always short of.”

“Do you know what the driving force is behind all sciences?”, M. Tuniak asked. “Communication. The better the communication works between scientist, the better the result will be. Communication without limits and unlimited access to knowledge are the most important pillars of science. Or should be. That's why we inspired Otlet and La Fontaine to their little collection. Do you believe me, when I say that we were responsible for them getting the idea?”

Elisa nodded. She had just seen dinosaurs. She was now sitting on the roof of a building in Madrid in the year 1999. No matter what he told her, she would believe it now.

“You have seen our...archive and the state it is in”, the woman with a bear, who had introduced herself as “Alice”, continued. “Your first priority would be to bring order into that chaos. To find some kind of system to file all the data. Then, to find the information we need. You would be working alone there. Can you imagine yourself doing this?”

“Of course she can”, M. Tuniak answered in her stead. “She can skip a... dark part of history and live in the future.” He didn't seem to have any doubts that she would accept their offer. His thoughts had already jumped to another topic. “What's your secret?”

“I'm sorry?”, Elisa said confused.

“Well, the way Paul described how you work, it can't be explained simply by you having a better memory than basically anybody else”, M. Tuniak said. “So, how do you do it?”

Elisa had the feeling that he was already suspecting the answer. But she had never told anyone about her secret and she wouldn't start now with someone she had barely known for more than a day.

“It's not important”, Mme Alice said. “We were just curious, but you don't have to tell us.”

M. Tuniak didn't seem happy about it, but one look from Alice and he dropped the topic.

“I've got grapheme-colour synesthesia”, Mme Debarou explained.

“I have never heard of that”, I said. “What is it?”

Instead of answering directly, she asked me to take a sheet of paper and write the letter E on it, as often as I could. While I was doing that, she stood up and went to the window, with her back turned to me. Without turning around, she then asked me to hide as many F as I wanted between the Es. When I had finished doing that as well, she came back. She took one look at the paper, no more than a second I'd say, and then she said: “There are seven F.”

“How did you know that that quickly?”

“When I read or see a letter, I not only see what you can see, but every letter also has its own colour”, Mme Debarou explained. “F, for instance, is green, whereas E is blue. So when I look at this sheet, I see seven green dots in front of a background of blue.”

“But then you can't see colours the same way I do, can you?”

“No, I see them as well”, she said. “It's as if I can see two colours in the same space at the same time. And I always know which of these two colours everyone else is seeing, and which only I am seeing. And the same is true for numbers as well. Numbers also have their own colours.”

She didn't have to explain why this ability of hers was of great use to someone working in an archive. But I didn't understand why she had kept it a secret for so long.

“I thought that if I told other people about it, they would think me crazy”, she said. “I wouldn't have told it Alexander either, but one day, while we were talking about something completely different, he suddenly asked me if R was red or blue. I answered 'red' immediately and only after I'd said it did I realise why he had asked the question. Back then, he couldn't stand a secret. He had to know everything. That, and his inability to accept defeat, lead to what he calls his great failure.”

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