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I'm the author of the piece. I think the best clues are that the mystery hiker told people he was from Louisiana, and that he worked in the tech industry in NY. I suspect someone here might recognize him. I'm reachable at nxthompson at protonmail.
Has his DNA been checked against people in the various online sequencing sites? You might be able to find a relative that way. They found a serial killer through that a year or two ago.
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Aneurisms, strokes, toxins (spider/snake bites). The first is pretty quick, but the latter two could leave someone sufficiently weak or incapacitated to move and care for themselves, but still survive long enough to become emaciated.
It would take a fairly long time for even a 130 person to get into the 80s. If you can't move or care for yourself, you'd be dead in that tent in less than 3 days.
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"DNA is our best bet" No, social networks are. More than likely there are people who absolutely know who he is, they just need to see the photo. DNA databases are not necessarily comprehensive, if there aren't people in his lineage who are both registered and who know about/of him, then it won't work.
Put his dna into 23andme and a detailed family chart will emerge. This is the future of crime fighting, or if someone has lost memories.
It's amazing how rude Facebook, reddit, and in this case, greedy companies, can be. If he cared enough about anyone knowing who he was, he'd have told someone. This is just blatant disregard for a man's privacy.
The Screeps detail seems like something that could be fairly easily pursued... there can't have been that many players of that game to begin with, let alone those that would care so much about it that they would journal their thoughts about it. A quick check of the GitHub repo doesn't show he contributed code, but might he have opened an issue, contributed to docs? Might there be someone who was active in the communi…
If someone wants to check, I'd bet he at least forked or starred the github repo. A script to pull the list of those people, minus anyone whos been active since april 2017, would probably show his account.
- amidman
- eqzus
- Mike Hancoski (follows users from NY, wrote PHP code, his personal website domain wasn't renewed and is now available.)
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DNA is our best bet, but as we see it's the missing part of the story. With this said, it makes for a decent fictional writing prompt. It's 2045, the cold case on Mostly Harmless has been reopened after 24 years. Advances in DNA matching technology beyond what we imagined possible in 2020 have occurred. Detective Williams submits the preserved DNA to the US National DNA Registry (DNAR). Within minutes an exceptionall…
"DNA is our best bet" No, social networks are. More than likely there are people who absolutely know who he is, they just need to see the photo. DNA databases are not necessarily comprehensive, if there aren't people in his lineage who are both registered and who know about/of him, then it won't work.
Could it be a Canadian that drove to NY and then hiked west? That's a pretty common thing to do. I have a bunch of friends from college that are bouncing around the globe travelling on foot, picking fruits and doing farm-work when they run out of funds. Or are the databases / missing persons agencies communicating with each others?
Clues here are: he’s from Louisiana, worked in NY in tech, liked screeps. Coder from the looks of his notes. Mid 30s to late 40s.
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Which again is strange, since he was found with $3500 on him.
And there was food nearby. On the other hand, on the show Alone a few seasons back the medical staff had to pull someone who had weeks worth of smoked fish saved up yet was risking serious organ damaging due to malnutrition. Even though he had plenty of food he was simply rationing too strictly and had lost over 20% of his bodyweight in a matter of weeks. Point being, it's possible to put oneself in danger despite ha…
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It would take a fairly long time for even a 130 person to get into the 80s. If you can't move or care for yourself, you'd be dead in that tent in less than 3 days.
True. I saw another poster commenting on a case where a person was being too strict in rationing their (plentiful) food. Which perhaps makes more sense here. If he'd already lost a lot of weight and stamina as a result of that, could've laid down and died shortly after.