Hollerith

Hollerith punched card. Steganographic analysis suggests that the card maybe carry several hundred bytes of concealed data.

Hollerith (? - ?) better known as "The Card Man", is a time traveller who trades in data.

In his role as The Card Man, he buys, stores, and sells data using punched cards which he has modified to acts as random-access, read-write devices, typically with one or more steganographic encryption channels. High-end cards may incorporate artificial intelligence (nonfiction) -- or perhaps smarter demons.

His methods are secret, but assumed to involved the Gnomon algorithm, demons, or both.

Technically, he functions as an owner-operated transdimensional corporation, but he prefers to call himself "an ordinary guy doing his job".

He is also a gunslinger, less by choice than necessity.

Hollerith and Havelock are friends and allies. Both tend to reside in frontier towns, and travel between them when not residing, often during the American West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Fiction cross-reference

• Demon (nonfiction)
• Gnomon algorithm
• Havelock - friend and colleague.
• Owner-operated transdimensional corporation
• Ticketology - the science, or pseudo-science, of punched cards and destiny.

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Herman Hollerith (nonfiction)
• Hollerith card (nonfiction)