“Your second riddle’s eight hundred, eighty eight, plus eight eight, plus three more eights one after another. That’s eight eights on paper, just using addition, and it all equals exactly one thousand.” I said, scribbling the little mini-equation.

Compared to riddle number one, there was a massive gulf in difficulty change. But on the other hand, this riddle felt more like an actual riddle so Speaker had changed something up between the jump from riddle to mathematical savant.

Speaker hummed. “I judge this as correct.”

“You judge it? Where’s your friend?”

“Judge has withdrawn, to complete your prior request. This second joust of words is between you and I now, human and no other.”

It didn’t refer to me as a thief this time, progress. As for the other request I had for Judge… “You mean teach me how to slap people around in the digital sea?”

“As you so crudely put it, yes.”

“So how’s it going to teach me skills in the digital sea? Are we talking a coloring book or more guided meditation session? I have preferences.”

It scoffed. “I am uncertain, I do not have any contact with Judge other than to hear its decree. Where it goes, or where it exists, I do not follow.”

All right, so it was going to show up in my future at possibly some strange time. But at least it would be on my side. I lifted the cape up, holding it in place. Already one good use I could see for this would be to tie it backwards. As in, have the white cloth side inwards to my back and leave the empty tunnel into the higher dimension on the outside. Anything taking a swing at me as I’m running away (Heroically) would have a harder time actually landing a hit.

Just using it like so would certainly make this cloth worthwhile to bring around, but I had a very strong hunch there was another use for this. More than one way to use a dimensional cape. “All right Speaker, your part of the bargain now: Will this thing kill me if I stick my head through it?”

“It will not.” Speaker said.

Can we trust the mite construct to be objective? I sent to Prime through the soul tendril brushing on the mite lantern. I’d trust Judge, but Speaker makes me think: Sneaky nefarious schemer.

It does take one to know one, yes. Superior sent back, and we shared the mental equivalent of finger guns at each other. But seriously Prime, I could see Speaker try to murder us out of pure pettiness. Give me a second, I asked earlier but the mites are still answering right now.

There was a pause as I waited, but Superior returned quickly after. Mites give it an all green, or as far as I can understand. Most of them said green, a few others gave random colors and shapes instead. Figuratively speaking. Gods, mitespeakers really are half-insane. I want hazard pay after all this.

Would you settle for a To’Aacar shell in these trying times? It’s currently pre-owned, but I think we can get the current owner to sell it at a discount. You’d need to fix it up yourself but I believe in your abilities Superior.

He gave me a rugged handshake, and we put it on the goals list. Only thing better than stealing Avalis’s first shell, is to steal his second one.

As for the cape… Well, Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I held it up, then stuck my head through.

The other side was… odd. It was as if I’d just put my head through a glassless window, so nothing on the other side of it was different from the world here. Except if it could move.

In that case, it seemed to be like long exposure photography. Just one giant smear of blurred movement. Very detailed, like a three dimensional long exposure photography.

I wouldn’t have recognized some of the blurred things in this room, like the screen images were a mess of colors now, but there was something in there that I could recognize: Me.

Walking from the terminal over to the cube, and then doing all kinds of motions over the cape as I fiddled with it. “I don’t have half enough drugs for this occult scrapshit.”

“Journey’s got a few choice selections of painkillers if you’d like deary.” Cathida suggested. “Just saying.”

I decided to gamble on what this other side of reality was, and stepped completely through, leaving only my hand holding the cape up on the other side. The sides of the fabric draped downwards, held just by my hand from the ‘inside’ reality here.

There was something off with this side of the cape. I mean other than all this. I imagine if there were more things moving around me, it would be actual insanity.

One exception in all this is that I could see that my own movements within this side of the cape did not incur the blurred overlay. I moved my hand up and down, nothing appeared behind it. I then wiggled the cape I was holding up and down, then looked over to the other side of it.

It was inverted. Now the white fabric was on that side, while the side I’d stepped through was the one leading back into reality.

“I need a name for this pocket space dimension thing.” I said, “Cathida. Options. Stat.”

“The Dark Side.” She said. “Suitably ominous, easy to say, and best of all not something stupid like Keith’s Hangar Space.”

“You had me at ominous.” I said. “But my own private hangar space is also pretty neat.”

Come to think of it, could I store things in the Dark Side? If I took an object and left it here, did it vanish, follow behind, or stay right here until someone found a way into the dark side other than through my cape?

I still held it up with my gauntlet and I wasn’t going to let it drop anytime soon. I was half-terrified that if I let it completely close, I might be trapped in this dimension. It probably looked like a floating cape holding itself up on some invisible pole from the outside.

I lowered the cape slowly down to the ground. Then back up and tested my range of motion with it. I could even hold it up like a bedsheet, widening the window back to the Light Side. Then I brought the cape back down all the way to the ground, until only the tips of my fingers were exposed into the actual reality. Rest of me was in this strange otherside world, that I knew didn’t appear in the real world.

I had tested the cape earlier by sticking my hand through it and found it missing on the expected other side. I could imagine the same would happen to the rest of my body. I could pull a vanishing trick now with this thing, neat.

Now, did occult work in this dimension too? I flared it out, touching on multiple fractals and waking them up from their dormant state, then focused on the dome fractal that existed by my palm. A small shield appeared as it should.

Could I escape all harm by jumping on this side of the world and then protecting just the cape from being destroyed by stuffing it all under one single occult dome shield? Possibly two with Superior backing me up.

“Speaker?” I called out. Didn’t have high hopes it could hear me in the Dark Side, but it oddly proved me wrong a moment later.

“I can hear you, yes.” Speaker said.

“You can?”

“Sound waves travel through higher dimensions without issue. The distance you are from my microphones is simply a longer path for the sound waves to travel. You are audible at this distance, less loud than outside the cape. A small mercy.”

“So this side of the cape really is a higher dimension?” Am I standing inside the fourth dimension, or just displaced along the lines of it somewhere?

“Answers shall be given only when I have my third and final riddle solved and no earlier. You shan’t trick me a second time, knave.”

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

I looked over to my trails of movement. Parts of it were vanishing, simply gone out of existence. Mostly from the back of the trail, when I was at the console earlier answering questions. Which meant whatever time slices this side of the cape had, it did have a limit.

High dimensions… Timeline exposed… sound could still travel outwards here.. Light side, dark side…

Nope, I have no godsdamned idea of what this cape was about. “Fine, I’ll solve your last riddle.”

Two plus two made four, but also multiplied to four, and I had to figure out the next set of three whole numbers that did the same, not including zero.

There were solutions probably with modulo arithmetic and p-adic number shenanigans, or working with something besides base ten. And probably even more solutions to this if Speaker hadn’t restricted it to whole numbers only. Matrix arithmetic might also have a few vectors that could do the same thing, or finite fields where things converge together in the end anyhow.

Or I could simply lie and gaslight my way to victory too. Convince speaker three, three, and three equaled four, and multiplied to four somehow. I just had to believe hard enough, and double down until it starts questioning reality.

Zero of course was the best answer for almost everything, but Speaker had specifically said above zero. Therefore, that led me to one possible direction: One. The second best number in mathematics.

Also speaker never said I had to use the same numbers. “One, two and three add to six, and multiply to six too. How’d I do?”

“That is… correct.” Speaker said. “You have solved my riddles to satisfaction, with exception to the abomination. And we shall never speak of that event ever again.”

That last part was said real quick, in more of a low mutter. There was a threat in there too, implicit. Amazing how much data could be fed into language just by the tone.

“Honestly, why are these the followup riddles you have compared to solving the entire Riemann Hypothesis for the first? There’s a huge jump in difficulty here.”

Speaker didn’t answer for a moment. “...I discovered your mathematics and was excited to try it. I discovered these two riddles at first, and thought them most wonderful. I then decided to make the third riddle the strongest. Stronger than the other two.”

“You tunnel visioned hard, didn’t you?”

“...yes. My work grew… obsessive perhaps. Especially when I realized a great flaw to my new discovery: Mathematics is a language built to solve problems. All riddles I could craft with such a tool would inevitably be solved. However unlike riddles, mathematics offers a spectrum of difficulty, from most trivial, to nearly impossible. All of it well categorized.”

“I see where this is going. Why settle for something medium difficulty, when you could go all in?”

And Speaker isn’t human. It’s a program, and programs didn’t view timelines as finite like humans did. All the time in the world, none of the boredom possible. It was only a matter of time until Speaker solved this hypothesis.

“Correct. Thus I focused on one problem that hadn’t been solved yet. And when I had completed my work, I felt it would be better to rearrange the order of my riddles.”

“And the ordering of putting these two behind instead of starting off with them… ah, you sneaky little shit-stirrer, you were trying to intimidate riddle guessers, weren’t you?”

Start off with an impossible riddle, and insinuate there are two more to go if anyone solves the first one.

“I am not required to admit to anything further.” Speaker said, sounding extremely annoyed.

Which, of course, was a roundabout way of saying ‘Yes, I absolutely had nefarious intentions here.’ That, or Speaker leaned more to the To’Orda route and didn’t want to remake new riddles each time someone somewhere solved the first two before getting caught by the third. If they’d never be able to get the third anyhow, why muck around with the weaker two?

It also meant in fourty or so years, possibly a little less if Speaker had grown smarter from it’s dabbling with the Riemann Hypothesis, it will come up with another solution to the next hardest math problem to solve, and then use that as the lock to bar humanity again from all treasure caches out there. And I had a hunch it would do it’s best to patch up the little loophole I’d done here.

Well. Maybe I might be alive when that happens, and that’ll be future Keith’s problem to deal with. Good luck me. Today, I really needed this nifty cape. I’m sure he’ll understand.

Speaking of. “Cape full explanation time now?”

“Step through the cape completely, and you shall move among the higher dimensions for a sliver of your time. When you are prepared to depart, step back through the cape.”

“Yeah, I figured that part out already. Tell me some new information I don’t know?”

Speaker did.

And the amount of ratshit I could pull off increased. Exponentially.

------

To’Wrathh’s progress had stalled. The last report Relinquished had read showed her advancing in the opposite direction of where the goddess needed her to be. Frustrating.

To’Sefit and the other Feathers should be acting as an appropriate harrying force, and yet they were out of the area, licking their wounds.

Strife and conflict helped sharpen her little shiv, To’Naviris had been a good addition, as had the Winterscar. But both were ultimately unneeded if it did not push To’Wrathh to her ultimate destination.

Reports showed her acting with To’Orda within one of the hostile biomes. Mite zones that weren’t built to support life, and this particular one was extremely hostile to just about everything - even plants and insects couldn’t grow or flourish there.

Her machine swarms there were active, guarding the territory in her name of course, and they had been mobilized by To’Sefit to chase and attack both To’Orda and To’Wrathh. Acceptable amount of harrying force applied, although she would have to speak directly to that Feather and get her to increase pressure.

She debated if she should trigger the unity fractal and scare the Feather into compliance. A reminder that Mother was waiting for results. She’d done that a few times so far, mostly for fun, but the results had pushed To’Wrathh on the path she required faster.

To’Orda on the other hand was a lost cause now. Shortly prior to To’Naviris being destroyed, all his backdoors had been wiped. All at once. It could have happened naturally if the Feather began to generate new data and programming, accidentally overwriting supposedly ‘empty’ memory locations. But the chances of that happening all at once, in every location the backdoors existed were very very low. Centuries of standard use could be expected before any of these locations were overwritten.

To’Wrathh must have shared with this one all her learned data, and convinced the Feather to make the modifications. A pity. However, unlike her little shiv in the dark, To’Orda was not required for future plans and could be disposed of at any time.

The mites already had their fingers all over her beautiful plan, she didn’t need another agent sneaking into the cast of characters she’d assembled. Best to verify if there was foul play in action here, or if it was a natural endpoint to To’Orda’s collision with To’Wrathh.

Abdication’s plan had to unravel exactly according to his general steps. And just like a growing plant, Relinquished needed to trim and prune the offshoots that would get in the way. As well as remove the weeds within the soil.

She went through the Feather’s history logs. He’d traveled down into this strata hunting down To’Wrathh in that trio’s misguided attempt to earn redemption ahead of punishment. That had been fine, the movements exerted the pressures she required on To’Wrathh.

There were a few intelligent species on this biome, but none of those animals had any root to homosapiens, and such were below her attention. To’Orda’s hostile takeover of their race had no effect on the backdoors within his programming at that time point either. She checked through the history further, finding a replica human cruiseliner built by mites, operated by a mite-made simulcranium of a virtual tour guide. Interesting choice for the mites, and as usual, it was half-insane, obsessive about one singular task and unable to process most other items of note. A specialist virtual intelligence.

She saw To’Orda repeat instructions again and again, only to have the cruiseliner AI fail to answer or even understand the most advanced instructions. She could leave this cruiseliner replica alone for now, perhaps for a future narrative where humans raced to find shelter within that abandoned ship, only to have that virtual intelligence taken over by herself, and then made to slowly execute each human within the bowls of that ship. An excellent horror story. There would be survivors after all of this was done after all.

Humanity always survived in smaller groups, even Abdication saw no possible way around such a result. The only difference this time is that Tsuya would not be around to save the rest of the species as the survivors dwindled down. Destroying each and every group would wipe the species off the world for good this time.

She followed the logs until the fight with To’Naviris, and noticed only after To’Wrathh had reached out to send a deal offer, did the backdoors vanish.

No foul play. No mites involved in this one. She could allow the Feather to remain alive for now, as a small counterbalance force. In case the other two Feathers grew unruly or possibly too good at their job. To’Aaacar had performed above expectations, spotting the early signs from To’Wrathh far faster than Relinquished had needed him to. Fortune smiled upon her when that one was naturally defeated without any intervention on her part.

What she was more worried about remained with the same human who’d come into the picture again and again. The Winterscar. Now a mite agent.

She searched through the scattered logs, backtracking through time, looking for any hints on the mite creation at his hip. It reappeared when To’Wrathh and the human returned from the void zone. A location she couldn’t track. It didn’t rouse much suspiton in her, after all the mites had many biomes she couldn’t follow behind.

From there, she tracked and looked through. The priority events had shown her when the group had come across machine interference, or when threats were nearby. And of course, the human had searched through the digital sea himself at one point. She toyed with him personally.

Relinquished continued looking for hints and clues behind their pathway down here. Too much of the path was spent in darkness, all her tools and usual spyware unreliable.

And then she found something. A very small thread. Unnoticed until she examined everything herself rather than rely on simpler priority pings from her instruments.

There was a mite terminal triggered in that general location, among the path the group had taken. A large scrambled file had passed through, encrypted. She couldn’t touch on that without putting her hands on the other side of the mite sea. But she did find something of note. A single comms program was on that terminal, left behind after its use.

It was now connected to nothing, nowhere. No data was left in memory. But she recognized the footprints here. This must have been done by another human, one of their mitespeakers running loose in the world again.

A paranoid one, but nothing that would stop her for long now that she had the scent. Because there was one bit of data to recover in this ancient terminal - A single username:

Abraxas.