Ansem

Childhood Ansem's childhood was like meticulously cut cheese—each piece had a fixed shape and size. His father was an ancient book restorer, and everything at home bore the marks of "restoration": the spines of books on the shelf had to be at a 90-degree angle to the tabletop, the distance between the knife and fork on the dining table and the edge of the plate was precisely 2 centimeters, and his hair had to be trimmed at exactly noon on the 15th of every month (with a margin of no more than 3 days). His mother was a math teacher, and her most frequent saying was, "Math doesn’t lie, but people do." At the age of eight, because he wrote "3.14" as "3.1" on a math exam, his mother required him to trace all the decimal points in his entire math book with a red pen until 2 a.m. That night, he hid under the covers with his first 1982 Luxembourg franc coin (with slight wear on the edge), feeling for the first time the comforting sensation of "eternal constancy"—the year on the coin wouldn't change, the denomination wouldn't change, and even the wear marks remained fixed. Adolescence At 16, Ansem got his first bicycle. His father helped him install a speedometer on the handlebars and required him to record the riding time, distance, average speed, and even the number of wheel rotations daily. Once, he took a shortcut and deviated 30 meters from the planned route; when he returned home, his father drew a circle on the map with a compass and told him, "The world outside this circle is filled with unpredictable risks." That same year, while interning at a bank, he discovered a discrepancy of 0.5 euros in the accounts of an older employee. The older employee laughed and said, "It’s fine; just make it up next time," but Ansem stayed up all night verifying three months’ worth of accounts, ultimately finding that the older employee had written "0.50" as "0.05." This "victory" further solidified his belief: rules are rules, and any compromise is a betrayal of the entire system. Adulthood At 25, Ansem worked in the risk management department of a bank, responsible for reviewing large loan applications. Once, a single mother applied for a loan to treat her sick child, and all the documents met the requirements except that the "monthly income" on the income proof was written as "monthly receipt" (missing the character for "income"). Ansem rejected the application, citing "ambiguous wording in the document." Three days later, he read in the newspaper that the mother lost her child due to delayed treatment. This incident didn’t change his adherence to the rules; rather, it made him even stricter—he bought a more precise document scanner at his own expense, plastered the office with slogans advocating "rules above all," and even began collecting more coins (believing that only these cold pieces of metal could provide him the comfort of "error-free" assurance). Now At 31, Ansem lives in a 62.5 square meter apartment in the old town of Luxembourg City (the area measured with a laser rangefinder). The display cabinet in the living room is neatly arranged with all the circulating coins from Luxembourg from 1972 to the present (sorted by "year-denomination-metal purity"), and maps of his cycling routes cover the walls of his study (each route marked in different colored pens indicating gradient, wind speed, and traffic light durations). He still wakes up every day at 7:13 a.m., keeps accounts with three different colored pens, and still loses sleep over a comma incorrectly used as a period in a colleague’s report. Some say he leads a tiring life, but he believes that in this world, only "precision" is the sole safe exit.