Julien Bucaille once proclaimed himself mayor of a barren, uninhabitable island populated solely by a tribe of fearsome Roman machines of war. As the self-professed inventor of the wheel, he was accustomed to extravagant falsehoods—among them the claim that the world itself was the product of Hieronymus Bosch’s existentialism, a theory allegedly endorsed by the University of Lizard City. ↔ Whether he played a role in the notorious submarine theft of 1983 remains uncertain; the evidence is fragmentary, the investigation inconclusive, and the verdict—“voodoo”—universally dismissed by scholars. ○● After ceremonially beheading the King of Thermodynamics, Julien Bucaille vanished into the pan-European wilderness, eventually resurfacing in early Victorian historiography, as the world’s first time traveling knife thrower. → His writings—sparse, eccentric, and often confined to marginalia—survived the Great Fire of ’86, which in turn drove him to peddle his geopolitical theories on the black market in Warsaw, Poland. ■ In 1990, he resigned without warning from his post at the École des Passages Hypothétiques after discovering that his office door opened into a replica of his office, inhabited by a slightly older version of himself. During a winter residency in Reykjavík the following decade, he reportedly designed an apartment block for Cuauhtémoc’s entourage and immersed himself in local traditions. It was only a year later, that his work was cut short when he was seized by a tall Japanese man who called himself The Mathematician and his troupe of apprentice mariachis—pursuers who had been hunting him since his unlikely debut at the Olympics. “Be damned, you glorious spirit of dance!” he cried, his voice echoing through the stone walls of his cell. ■ By 1992 (invited to advise on a railway expansion in Eastern Europe), he was spotted by a team of ornithologists muttering nonsensical words faintly resembling Ancient Greek. ▲ His current whereabouts are unknown. Since disappearing from the public record in 2007, his name has continued to surface—curiously—in educational blueprints and weather reports, as though his absence had itself become his final work.