Agent Singh replayed the video yet again, squinting in disbelief.

Based on the time-stamp, the impossible happened while she and Maria were up on the roof. First, the tripod inside the mouse cage beeped, activating the camera, then flashed three times, once per second.

Three… two… one...

Exactly one second after the third flash, the mouse appeared. At first, Maria had thought she’d blinked and missed something. But there had been nothing to miss. The mouse was not there, and then it was.

No puff of smoke or flash of light heralded its arrival. When Agent Singh paused and stepped through high-speed footage frame-by-frame, the effect still appeared instantaneous. In one frame, there were two mice. In the next, three.

The newcomer wore a metal harness like the others, but this time, only one LED was lit. Three, two, one -- a convenient numbering system for identical triplets.

Kind of a letdown, thought Maria.You would think it’d glow. Or maybe fade in, looking a little ghostly. This all looks like a kid smushed two video clips together in Movie Maker. Singh’s never going to believe it.

“This footage,” said Singh, breaking the silence, “looks convincing.”

“What, really?”

“The other mice remain in consistent positions. So do the wood chips by their feet. You couldn’t have put the third mouse in and spliced the clips together. I don’t think you removed the third mouse from the early parts of the video, either. Too technically demanding, especially with footage from two camera angles.”

She fast-forwarded past the third mouse’s appearance and played a brief segment. The new mouse was sniffing at the others; displeased by this, the mouse with two lights briefly chased it around the cage.

“All three mice interact. This looks real.”

Maria barely dared to voice her thoughts. “This... it's such a relief!”

“You weren’t lying about the mice.”

“Oh, I'm so --”

“But you’re still the sole suspect for the shooting.”

Maria’s face fell. What was it going to take to clear her?

“The next priority,” added Singh, jotting some notes and looking more like a blasé court stenographer than someone who’d just witnessed a blatant violation of common sense, “is determining the nature of your uncle’s research. We need to get into his safe.”

As they returned to the scene of the shooting, Maria racked her memory for clues. Safe key… a safe key…

“That globe. Uncle Johann hid a key inside,” said Maria. She pointed to the faux antique, unwilling to disturb the scene.

Agent Singh picked it up and shook it with gloved hands. Inside, something rattled hollowly. “A puzzle box. Do you have any idea what the combination is?”

Maria bit her lip. “He put it in much too quickly for me to see.”

Rapping the glove with her knuckles, Singh said, “Seems fragile. We could crack it open.”

Maria took a sharp, hissing breath through her teeth. Her uncle hadn’t meant the globe for secure storage. Anybody who knew what was inside could smash it open. Instead, it might make sense to think of it as a riddle, and when Uncle Johann started telling riddles...

“The combination itself is a message. Maybe just a message to himself,” said Maria. “I... do you really think we should just smash it open?”

"Have it your way."

Agent Singh turned the curio over again, scrutinizing it from every angle. The following epigram was printed around the North polar circle:

Atoms and systems into ruins hurled / And now a bubble burst, and now a world. - Alexander Pope

Around the South polar circle, in similarly fine text, was a second epigram:

To every man is given the key to the gates of Heaven. The same key opens the gates of Hell.

Tiny marks marred the equator, rendering it shaky and uneven. Singh’s hand lens revealed the cause of this irregularity. In four places, the line had been replaced with dense, microprinted numbers. She read them aloud, starting from the Greenwich meridian and proceeding east:

First set: 080645 0815

Second set: 042686 0123

Third set: 021522 1434

Fourth set: 061824 1612

Singh shut her eyes. “This one’s mine.”

The last two sets were all too obvious to her. The third referred to the events that resulted in the founding of her own agency. And the fourth referred to the tragedy she had commemorated so succinctly on the cover of a Manhattan phone book. She shook off the bitter memory of the tragedy and began to manipulate the globe, pushing down on four cities.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Interaction: Which locations need to be pressed, and in what order, to open the globe? It may be useful to check Internet resources for this, but nothing more advanced than Wikipedia should be needed.

🔒 Locked Narration: The Key to Heaven and Hell

"Then we're stuck?" asked Maria.

“Even without the second key,” said Singh, “there’s still something we can do.”

Singh navigated the clutter to reach Johann Palmstroem’s desk, then sat down. His chair was set too high for her, leaving her feet dangling an inch off the floor. The victim had been a tall man. She pressed the power button. The computer whirred to life, its fan rattling slightly. Like everything else in this lab, it had been left ill-maintained.

Username: JPalmstroem. Password: unknown.

“You wouldn’t happen to know your Uncle’s password?”

“No,” said Maria.

"Not even a hint? That's too bad."

Deciding it was best to make herself more useful on the scene than she would be in a jail cell, she added, “But he did show me how he makes passwords.”

Long before, Uncle Johann had instructed Maria to use a mnemonic device to make her passwords safer:

Choose a quotation. Take the first letter of each word. Anything that’s capitalized in the original is capitalized in the password. Replace any to with 2, any for with 4, any o with a zero, and so on. If you forget the quote, you can always leave some sort of reminder.

For example, if the quote was “Men dare to live, and fools to die,” the password would be ‘Md2laf2d’.

Maria had listened with little interest, but, in defiance of her Uncle’s advice, set every last one of her passwords to ‘ver0n1caMars’. Looking back, that probably wasn't very secure. But then, neither was REDQUEEN; maybe he made an exception for puzzle passwords.

“It would probably be based on a quote.” Maria began to flip through books from the bookshelf before Singh stopped her.

“If it's a quote, there might be a lead. We found a note in his shirt pocket,” said Singh. “I’ll show you.”

A few minutes later, Maria and Singh were squinting at a crumpled piece of paper in a plastic tray on the breakroom table. Singh had removed it from its evidence bag to allow examination from all sizes. Some of Uncle Johann's blood had seeped through his shirt and stained a corner of the page a deep brown, and it took all of Maria's resolve to focus on the writing, and not this bleak reminder of her uncle's violent end.

Several lines were crossed out, but what looked like the most recent one remained uncanceled.

AAiW, ch. 7, riddle

TtLG, ch. 2, “now, here”

Dream of F., s. 11, l. 2

AAiW, ch. 12, r. 42

Dream of F., last line

TtLG, ch. 5, a poor sort

“Well," said Maria, "Once I've checked a few books, I can get you his password. His previous passwords, too, if you want them. Can you just... take a photo, or something? I don't want to look at it any more.”

Singh obliged, and soon Maria was back at her Uncle's bookshelf.

All the same author? He really was kind of obsessed, she thought.

Interaction: What is Uncle Johann’s most recent password? An Internet resource may be needed to solve this. Ten characters long.

You can also try to guess his prior passwords, though it isn't necessary to proceed.

Narration Unlocked by SmolShrimpa: A Poor Sort

Spoiler: Spoiler

There it was, in the fifth chapter of Through the Looking Glass:

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.

Maria dictated the password to Singh, following her Uncle's rules: Iaps0mt0wb

Later, this passage would come back to haunt Maria. But at the moment, as the computer booted up successfully, she didn't ruminate about its broader significance. Pumping her arm with triumph, she gave a small whoop, ignoring Agent Singh's sharp look.

Not even death could stop Uncle Johann from sending Maria riddles, or keep Maria from solving them.

The desktop on Johann Palmstroem's computer was uncluttered, even spartan. Though entropy had been allowed to work unchecked upon his physical surroundings, no such latitude was given in this virtual space. The few icons permitted to remain here all paraded soldier-like in a single column. And in a perfectly centered rectangle in the center of the screen, a background photo presented itself for inspection.

Maria, Noelle, Vincent, Henry, Uncle Johann, and Alice Park all were smiling into the camera, all crouched in front of the corkboard in what was then Henry's office, which had been covered in bright red construction paper for the event. Birthday balloons floated at the edge of the frame, and pieces of red crepe dangled from the ceiling. Just behind and over the heads of the revelers, multicolored cardboard letters spelled out a message on the corkboard:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HENRY!

There had been no comma in the package, but young Vincent had insisted on cutting the punctuation mark out of construction paper and pinning it on.

"This photo... it must have been taken just a few days before Mom disappeared."

Singh stared, as if fallen into a reverie. Could it be that this sentimental keepsake had softened her heart?

"It was the last time all of us were together," whispered Maria.

"What? Oh, so it was," said Singh, absently. "Is this in high-definition?"

Testing a hypothesis, she opened the photograph in an image editor. Indeed, it had been taken at a much higher resolution, and only displayed at a smaller size. An incredible stroke of luck. Stretching a dotted rectangular box around one particular object hanging on the corkboard, she zoomed in close.

Evidently, Henry's safe key had not been taken down for the festivities. It was definitely similar to the one they'd retrieved from the globe, but not the same. How convenient that it stood out sharply against the background, visible even in its finest detail!

"Oh," said Maria. While she was glad to have a lead on getting into the safe, she was also a shade disappointed that this was all Agent Singh had taken from the photograph, which had moved her to the core. "I see what you're thinking, huh. I guess we could do it all here, huh?"

Interaction:

What is Agent Singh planning to do with this photograph?

🔒 Locked Narration: Another Key

But that was not the only secret the computer held. 

"Um, so... my Uncle made kind of a... chatbot," said Maria. As reluctant as she was to even bring up the subject, she needed to know what he had been up to. "An AI program. He told it about his work. I think that icon is it... no, the one underneath."

Agent Singh hovered the cursor over a small, stylized image of a red chess queen.

"Do you want me to open it?"

"No," said Maria, her voice cracking a little. "But... I guess we'd better do it anyway."

It had been bad enough to be grilled by Agent Singh. But in the interrogation to come, Maria would be asking the questions...

And honestly? She dreaded this one even more.