Stephen Laurelby Geigen-Miller, The Swan of the North (1929-2028)

Born to Sergey Geigen and Ortolusa Miller, Stephen Laurelby Geigen-Miller lived for two years in Warsaw, Poland before his family immigrated to Canada as part of a secret government program to procure artistic talent from other nations (see 20th Century Art Wars). For much of his life, Geigen-Miller was raised on the mean streets of LaSalle, Ontario, where he contented with roving dance troupes and the occasional choreographed dance offs; before his 15th birthday, he had successfully defended himself from four “to the death” events (see LaSalle, Ontario Gangs). These were enormously confusing times for Geigen-Miller, in large part because his parents kept their artistic heritage a secret until his 18th birthday, wherein they revealed that they had been part of a Soviet psychoarts program designed to train members of the Polish ballet as moles and assassins (see Operation Nijinsky). Disillusioned, they sought help from the Canadian consulate and fled.

Though some biographers have claimed that Geigen-Miller was shocked by his parents’ revelation, evidence from his journals suggests that he found renewed clarity. On October 12th, 1956, he wrote:

“Few cities could be said to have faced the issues that LaSalle saw on a daily basis. Just last week, I witnessed a man get cut down by a dancer in stiletto heels made out of filed down railroad spikes. She simply windmilled her leg and drove that heel straight into his eye. All over a comment about her troupe’s sense of style. It didn’t seem weird to me that this was the way things were. Indeed, once I knew what was really going on in the world, it started to make sense in a way few things ever would again.”

For several years afterwards, Geigen-Miller continued to participate in the dance culture of LaSalle and even attended the LaSalle Dance Academy, a renowned institution founded by Beverly Schmidt of the Schmidt ballet empire. From 1958-1962, he pursued advanced studies in both dance as psychological practice and dance as martial art, thereby honing his “street” skills to such a point that his fellow students began to refer to him as “the Swan.”

A few days after graduation, Geigen-Miller was approached by Milton Tremblay of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to join the arts and counterespionage division (see the Franca Division). Initially hesitant, he eventually accepted the invitation after the conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis under the guise that his talents might be used to prevent nuclear war. While most of the documents from this period are still classified by the Canadian government, we do know that Geigen-Miller and his troupe were active in Berlin from 1966-1972, Washington D.C. from 1973-1975, and in Moscow from 1977-1981. They may have been responsible for the failure of Operation Quiet Dawn, in which Soviet experimental stealth bombers would strafe the Pacific coast as a demonstration of force, and the prevention of a retaliatory strike by the U.S. Air Force on Ostrov Oktyabrskoy Revolyutsii to destroy a Soviet dark matter bomb research facility (see Operation Slap’em).

Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the CSIS’ initially correct assessment of the end of the Cold War, Geigen-Miller opted for an early retirement and settled in Surrey, British Columbia, where he passed away from heart failure in 2028. Little is known about the period between 1989 and his death except that he kept an inordinately large library of books, collected pogs, and maintained meticulous records of his day-to-day life. Presently, his journals, which comprise approximately 332 individual books, are kept in the University of Toronto Libraries system, though some have been heavily redacted or placed in the restricted section due to the sensitive nature of their content.