an obituary for the factualist
by Seth Parker
Yesterday, March 13, 2087, marks the death of the man known as The Factualist, the last dedicated recorder of truth. Or perhaps he died today, on February 31, 1918. Or tomorrow, during an eclipse that no one else noticed. His fingerprints, already stained in ink when his body was found, identified him as one Matthias Krüger, while dental records list him as Juma Mwinyi. His neighbors knew him as Tahonetsakon Deerfoot.
He died of heat stroke in Reykjavik during a sudden onset of puberty. He died at 97, of rectal cancer, in a Singapore hospice, surrounded by silent televisions playing documentaries about extinct birds. He died in utero during a preemptive cremation.
Photographs, or rather images resembling photographs, show him as a man of indeterminate race and resolute posture. In one image, he holds a pen like a scalpel and appears to be dissecting a headline.
His mother was an albino descended from Persian royalty, his father a Kenyan Geology professor with a penchant for covertly licking the eating utensils in Michelin-star restaurants. Or: His mother was a sleeper cell of proto-nouveau anarchists with the exact nature of his father being less clear, quite possibly an incendiary device or a whispered thought. Alternately, his mother was a Macintosh PowerBook 2400c and his father an external floppy drive. He attended either Oxford or the Diederik Stapel Polytechnic in New Tanga, Antarctica, where he attracted early notoriety for exchanging counterfeit notes in the campus cafeteria with valid currency. One of his professors, a Wilfred Billingsworth, who remembered The Factualist fondly as comely, with high breasts, and long, blonde tresses, stated: “A lunatic, most certainly, with lunatic ideas, but there does exist, within the core of those ideas, a certain residue of brilliancy, prophecy, and perhaps even …” before being executed by the student body.
The Factualist’s writings first appeared in the late 2030s, or the mid-1800s, depending on which archive you access. He published Corrections I–XVII, slender but exact volumes containing lists of falsified historical details - biographies of globalist tyrants, aerial traffic patterns, oddities in rainfall data from 1952 onward. His works were banned in sixty-nine countries, including this one, but widely disseminated during The Great War for Our Own Personal Amusement as a means of demoralizing enemy troops.
There will be no funeral. His body is to be disassembled in a carefully cataloged choreography at the National Museum of Questionable Events.
We regret to inform the reader that we have told you too much, and while certain facts elude us, we are entirely certain of your name and home address. You have been scheduled for deletion. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your co-operation.
BIO: Seth David Parker is a South African teaching in Taiwan. He has no social media presence, and likes it that way.