From the original team at Niantic, there's only one living researcher left to check up on, Enoch Dalby.

Originally shared by Hank Johnson

From the original team at Niantic, there's only one living researcher left to check up on, Enoch Dalby. I have a lead on where he is and expect I'll have news on him soon enough.

Last time I logged on, I had a message waiting for me. I assume the sender was an Essexian though the name was unfamiliar to me.

This person asked me whether those of the Niantic researchers who had met untimely ends might somehow be immune to what happened during Shōnin. I'll be clear right up front: I don't know. But the question led me to think of those who sat with me around the plenary table in Geneva but didn't make it today.

There are of course, three such researchers. The first of them was a man named Victor Kureze.

Kureze was a quantum physicist, one of the first to posit and prove Exotic Matter, the Ordered Data pattern within it, and our ability to manipulate it. Lynton-Wolfe might have built the Ingress Scanner and learned to engineer all manner of XM objects, but his work would have been impossible without the foundation laid by Kureze. 

Kureze was at once the most brilliant mind and the most difficult person to get along with at Niantic. This was because despite all of us being an intelligent and dynamic group of people, our role in conversations with him was to nod and politely pretend to understand what he was talking about. It was frustrating for all involved and for the most part I just felt bad for him. I respected him immensely, and yet never was able to connect with him. To be peerless is a lonely place.

Kureze was found dead inside the Niantic Project Lab right around when the whole project was collapsing. Eyebrows were starting to rise on Capitol Hill, Ni was on her way out, Hazdata was on its way in and things were chaotic and messy. Right in the midst of all this, Kureze was discovered dead under circumstances that were extremely mysterious and yet  nobody wanted solved.... they just wanted the problem buried and forgotten.

And so it was. For a long time. Sealed in the room where he was attempting to unlock a part of science that none of us were, or are, prepared to deal with. From what we know, he attempted to use a Glyph sequence on Jarvis's body. Following that, it's unclear exactly what happened, but it ended in his death.

If I remember correctly, Victor was unmarried, had no siblings, his mother had passed and his father was in a care facility with advanced Alzheimer's.

I saw his body. It was under extremely stressful circumstances.  I don’t know what happened to it after that... whether he was buried or cremated. There is simply no record of the disposition of his remains.