Need an NPC (either real historical one or plausible invention); a British Fellow at CERN Close Enough to Tim Berner-Lee and Robert Cailliau in 1990 to Start a Tech Company in Geneva

Role-playing games
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Without doing any major damage to established history, I need an engineer, physicist or other scientist at CERN who’d be using cutting-edge computer technology and might plausibly become the front person for a tech company in Geneva, intended to use networking and computers somehow to profit. The fact that they are British is not something the people who hired them demanded, it’s a result of dice rolls modified for the population of the CERN member countries at the time.

Officially, they’d be the CEO and main owner of a new tech business, which was well-funded and appeared serious about whatever they were doing. They could hire some staff, but would not be allowed to pick the majority of it, nor the office manager who would really be in charge of the real purpose of the company. It’s not really important what idea is being pursued, but it should be something which demands a lot of networking, working with lots of data and access to powerful computers.

The figurehead scientist from CERN would be bound by an NDA about any other things the company does than pursue their idea, whatever it is, but would actually have access to a lot of powerful computers and the staff could occasionally do mundane things like help them work on implementing ideas. No one minds if the company turns a profit and our figurehead is guaranteed more than half of all the proceeds if something actually does, in addition to a salary which doubled what he was getting at CERN before his contract ran out.

That being said, either this figurehead needs to be extremely naive, or okay with the place being a front for an intelligence agency of some kind, to enable them to carry out what a curious and intelligent observer would determine was espionage against the Soviet Union and many of its former satellite states.

And the intelligence agency in question is not their own, although it appears it might have its blessing, as they were asked to sign the Official Secrets Acts before accepting the job. Best guess is French or Swiss intelligence, though if it was the Swiss, they should be able to just establish an annex somewhere doing this without a cover company, in their own country.

Does anyone have a suggestion about a real person whose biography has them leaving CERN at about this time (or a year or two later) and not doing anything all that historically notable in 1991?

Or a suggestion for a fictional person who might be good for such a figurehead, including a short curriculum vitae and description of the character as they are now?

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This is the era of Les Horribles Cernettes I believe?

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A Google search confirms that this is true, yes.

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Things I’m curious about and suspect that technophile discoursers from the UK and not-so-far-off the age range I am considering could help me with are things like:

  1. To what extent is Sir Tim Berners-Lee a typical academic/scientist, in a field where computers are central to their work, who gets offered a Fellowship at CERN?
  2. What would be other possible backgrounds, alma maters and fields of study someone from the UK with a CERN fellowship might have, which fits with them having been at least peripherally connected to Berners-Lee in 1989-1990, and working with networked computers a lot as part of their research?
  3. What might be plausible reasons for someone to accept an offer like this when their CERN contract is up?

In the case of no. 3, the reason might be a lack of other opportunities or a need for more money than any academic or scientific position they could get would yield, but it can’t be a scandal which is widely known or even known about by their now-former co-workers, at least not if it is something they would think is bad enough so that it would destroy relationships at CERN for my candidate.

It also can’t damage the scientific reputation of my candidate sufficiently so that they would do more harm than good for the reputation of the new company. I mean, yes, the new company is just a cover for espionage, but in order to be good cover, it needs to be viewed as real by experts in the field. My candidate has got to retain the trust of his colleagues at CERN and his new company has to be able to buy time on CERN supercomputers without everything they do being scrutinized with already-suspicious eyes.

Debts their colleagues don’t know about would be one way. A secret second family which requires more space than a cramped apartment, while my candidate is still paying for their previous/current family in the UK and their house. A gambling, drinking or drug problem which their colleagues don’t know about yet, because the candidate is really good at keeping up appearances. Anyone have other good suggestions?

Whatever it is, it has to be something the candidate has kept from all their colleagues, academic, scientific and those in private industry in the same field, but using rogue UK and French intelligence and security personnel and a total disregard for privacy and the rules of evidence, my private espionage cartel was able to uncover it.

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I can’t suggest a person (I would just make one up, it’s fiction, after all), but I would suggest that simulation of something complex is a good avenue. I’d suggest nuclear bpmbs, but that might be too obvious, but it would provide a reasonable explanation for some of the cloak and dagger stuff. But there was a lot of physical process simulation work around that time, so you could probably make it chemistry, if you would rather.

I suggest some sort of academic scandal— they faked their thesis experiments or something like that.

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I suspect that if a nuclear physicist specializing in nuclear weapons wanted to leave science and academia to instead get rich from their scientific discoveries, it would not be a good cover for espionage, but instead ring every alarm with UK, NATO, French and Swiss intelligence and security services. Not to mention making every Middle Eastern tinpot dictator salivate in expectation and Israel to put the cover company under a microscope.

Cover companies work much better when they pretend to be doing something more legal and less dangerous than their actual clandestine purpose. Not vice versa.

Would that not destroy their reputations in academic circles and make their former colleagues at CERN hesistant to trust them? That would mean their value as a figurehead would be little to none. They might have value for whatever their actual skills are, but they’re not being hired for their skills, but rather because they have academic and professional credibility plus relationships at CERN, both of which are useful for a front company to have plausibility and access they need.