The Abandoned Code of Atherton’s Folly

Atherton’s Folly, a massive stone house completed in 1885, was built by the wealthy but reclusive mathematical theorist, Dr. Elias Atherton, who used the annex as a private research center for complex actuarial problems related to shipping insurance. The house was Abandoned suddenly in 1890 after Dr. Atherton’s entire research archive, intended for publication, was destroyed in a mysterious fire. The house’s entire history became a testament to Sabotage. The key professional figure whose documentation is critical is the Actuarial clerk, Mr. John Finch, who managed the immense daily flow of data. Finch’s final documents—the calculation scrolls, counting tokens, and policy registers—are either Missing entirely or physically contradictory, suggesting an intentional effort to Sabotage the integrity of Dr. Atherton’s core formulas.

The Sabotage Calculation Scrolls

The Actuarial clerk was responsible for transcribing Dr. Atherton’s complex formulas onto calculation scrolls and then applying them to the policy registers. The deliberate defacement of the formulae on the calculation scrolls is a profound act of intellectual Sabotage. The formulas themselves—the core intellectual property of the research—were targeted. Furthermore, the complete Missing status of the policy registers, which held the final, crucial link between the theoretical formulas and real-world financial risk, proves that the entire project was rendered useless and Abandoned. The only surviving documents are the defaced calculation scrolls and the scattering of brass counting tokens, which are physically arranged in a Sabotaged sequence that yields an impossibly high insurance premium, suggesting the final act of the clerk was to render the formulas financially useless before the project was Abandoned.

The Abandoned Policy Registers