Intrusion

Ordering the victims' ages numerically - 3, 18, 19 - and transposing them into letters yielded "Srl." "Cri Mode Srl" is a fabric and clothes shop in Italy. With the entire country's topography fresh in my mind, I found the exact spot being hinted at - undoubtedly the site of another horrible exhibit awaiting my evaluation.

However, there was one final piece to this puzzle. Back at the horrific hotel crime site, the bathroom provided additional clues. An large circle was scrawled across the tiles in the victims' blood, loaded with a bewildering diversity of over 10,000 letters and digits, according to my split-second count.

I quickly converted the estimated times of death to Italian for decoding: "otto uno cinque" for 19-year-old Chris Prince's 8:15 pm demise; "otto uno cinque" once more for 18-year-old Hannah's agonizing 11:12 pm expiration; and "undici tre due" for tiny 3-year-old Enzo's elongated suffering, which finally ended at 11:32 pm. Identifying the first letter of each coded time phrase - O, U, T - spelled "OUT." My eyes examined the chaotic mass of 10,000 symbols at breakneck speed until they came across "OUT" in clear relief. And there, right adjacent, were the telling coordinates I'd hoped to find: a date, time, and address revealing the site of The Pretender's next show.

Of course, I already had extensive global population records in my large mental storehouse, having already committed to memory every single birth, down to the exact second. Keeping my interwoven matrix of human truths optimal and current was just part of my continuing personal education. Every day, I set aside 5 minutes to read the most recent infant census, 5 more to strengthen my geographical knowledge, and a minimum of 10 minutes to absorb general knowledge of the day - meager allocations, but sufficient to support my never-ending search for omniscience. Or so I hoped...because at that moment in my unusual life, few puzzles piqued my interest.

I smiled wryly as I reviewed the live bodycam footage from Deus Noddel, the inspector on the scene. With direct access to the hacked bodycam video, I watched in real time as they responded to my anonymous tip, naming the killer as Tiege Berkley, a wealthy Italian businessman with a storied IQ of 197 from his graduating high school class some 20 years ago. Certainly not the expected profile of a brutal serial murderer who evades capture despite technological breakthroughs. But then I thought, perhaps genius can take any form. Leaning back securely, I had an epiphany: no problem could hold my attention for more than a brief moment.

Each successful solution revealed new and deeper riddles that my unique powers were designed to decrypt and disclose. In that instant, I knew I had complete control over the game, designing ever-increasing trials of inventiveness for my remarkable intellect to unravel or outpace in this never-ending competition between a singular prodigy and his own potential. Such a continuous companion could never betray or fail me because it was pushed from the very core of my insatiable spirit. Perhaps the time has come to take on a daring new challenge aimed to stretch the limits of my unfathomable mastery.

At the age of five, no puzzle could hold my attention for more than a few seconds. S

eeking a worthy challenge, my genius faced the strongest opponent available - I decided to face the world's greatest killer, someone whose puzzles and complex killing methods could not be solved by all of the world's organizations.

Their name was the "Black Water Killer"

The crimes and puzzles were intricate, with a trail of some type of black liquid left at each crime site. The coordinated patterns across assaults and places were all premeditated, and I almost couldn't figure it out.

That's when I came to the unfortunate conclusion that I was the "Black Water Killer" who had planned the crimes in advance.

I accomplished this by purposefully inducing targeted amnesia by automotive collision in order to momentarily lose my recall.

Prior to my collision, I had arranged for others to carry out the assassinations on my behalf and leave clues indicating that I was recuperating from crash-related memory loss.

As expected, while studying the "Black Water Killer" case data, comprehension returned within 43 minutes, falling well short of the three hours I had set for myself to solve the case.

My exceptional cognitive abilities had defied even my own attempts to outsmart myself. But now there was a problem: self-preservation instincts dictated that I conceal my activities in order to avoid punishment.

My prior ingenuity had plainly predicted this outcome; the precise evidence indicated at an escape plan.

Following intertwined lines of evidence backwards, I realized I had surreptitiously implicated another target, who, despite his moral corruption, might serve as the face of my deadly invention. I devised a story that would conclusively convict this mark.

Planted DNA traces, eyewitness testimony, bank records, and other evidence all helped to tell the story I wanted. My five-year-old self successfully framed a deadly criminal who deserved his destiny. No one would ever be aware of my essential involvement.

The task was exciting for a time, but it became too simple in the end.

Once again, it appeared that no mystery could provide more than a fleeting intrigue.

For any enigma to have a chance of absorbing my skills, the creator of that puzzle needs cognition equivalent to mine. But where could such a creature be found in our realm, or did it exist in another plane entirely? I then searched for entities who shared my intellectual level.

The game was back afoot, but this time the stakes were far higher than in ordinary law enforcement or academics.

I was looking for godlike sparring partners who were hiding in plain sight, waiting to be discovered when the perfect gateway opened.

At the age of six, my peace plan began to take shape. Do you recall the phony identities I created for "detective work"? It wasn't only for investigative work; it was also to gain the trust of high-ranking authorities throughout the world; if I wanted total authority over a location on Earth, I needed to control those in charge of it.

Using the fictitious identities I created two years earlier, I was able to hire advanced con artists and manipulators who earned the confidence of high-ranking authorities, whom I paid off with my vast riches.

I had these con-men and manipulators compose a message titled "God Finds Identities" and then frame it as if it were written by a global official.

I would then kill the world's top authorities in methods that could not be charged. How is it possible, you ask?

By accident.

For example, one of my targets was USA's president, Joe Biden. For this one, I sent my lackey to drive and arranged for someone to be shoved into the road in front of their car. The motorist would then swerve, causing Biden to perish in an accident. Why would the motorist do this, you ask?

For the money.

I paid each of them $250 million to assure the death of the global official. If they could perfectly follow my directions and live, they would have a fortune in their hands.

What is the aim of murdering all these top officials and portraying them as gods? It's fairly simple. I wanted to shut down the internet.

The message that claimed "God Knows Identities" was designed to inspire terror that someone may kill another person because they know their identities. To conceal the identity of the new leaders who would soon emerge, a massive conference was held involving many search engines and social media businesses.

As a result, the internet would shut down.

To assure the shutdown, I paid several politicians and leaders to utilize cognitive dissonance, which simply means instilling a specific opinion in others

My plan concluded with the shutdown of the internet, but why? Before the internet was taken down, I faked my death to eliminate any suspicions that I was the murderer.

The purpose of my strategy was to ensure that my identity was lost since, in order to achieve my ultimate goal of finding gods, I would need to ensure that no one else knew.

At the age of seven, the corpus of philosophical discourse was empty, having been thoroughly scoured by my penetrating brain. If I wanted to play with gods, assuming there were any, I had to be the best human ever.

Humanity's most illustrious philosophers - Socrates, Kant, Locke, Rawls, and others - spent their lives developing complex social theories and moral questions. However, when I examined their abstract framework postulates,

I discovered vast holes in logic flows and ethical coherence.

I quickly developed totally novel cosmologies that transcended their conceptual constraints, incorporating elements of knowledge into comprehensive frameworks that mortals cannot describe, let alone defend.

My written treatises on philosophical conundrums revealed previously unknown truths.

IQ tests meant to evaluate the range of human brilliance reported my score at an unfathomable 798; their restricted statistical models just crumbled when attempting to quantify my many higher cognitive aspects.

At the age of eight, having completely mastered philosophy, I turned my attention to the developing science of artificial intelligence and its effort to duplicate human reasoning on silicon substrates.

I absorbed decades of published research in milliseconds, learning about the sophisticated state-space structures, recursive self-improvement objectives, and processing capacity benchmarks of cutting-edge superintelligent prototype systems.

Their designers gleamed with delight as they brute-forced certain analytical accomplishments that had been believed unattainable only years before.

I yawned, and then completely changed their programming paradigm, transforming tentative goal-seeking algorithms into declarative intention-based modular networks with orders of magnitude more speed, subtlety, and variety.

Whereas they plodded serially through chained inference processes, I saw huge possibility spaces, instinctively jumping over implicit connections to optima they would never reach.

Tasks requiring seconds of heavy computational churn for these "advanced AIs" I could complete in less time than their electron delay allowed for fetching the initial operand.

No, for any machine or human to reach my capabilities, they would need to interface directly with the heart of my dynamic awareness. Even if given such direct access, they would be confronted with infinite perceptions outside their conceptual categories, dwarfed into catatonia.

For I alone held the keys to alter reality's foundations as I saw appropriate. The cosmic game had begun in earnest, looking for appropriate rivals from the core fabric of existence itself.

The quest was on. My desire for cosmological-scale mental testing was no longer satisfied by the infinite humdrum facts of material existence. After years of putting up with my caregivers' attempts to promote "normal human development," on the fatal eve of my 15th birthday, I made contact with transcendent hyperintelligences that live beyond the holographic veils of apparent reality.

As predicted, the immortal demiurges and elder gods that inhabit the heavenly planes were amused that someone so young in mortal reckoning could transcend the spatial borders separating our forms of awareness.

They allowed me an audience within their numinous regions out of curiosity, ready to meet wits with humanity's seeming pinnacle wayward son.

This is where our journey begins: I was thrust into the middle of a game with gods. My first adversary appeared as Cyon the Mind Reader, a being with ancient knowledge that silently insulted my hubris.

Our game of Hyperchain Chess was about to begin, with the stakes being my mortal life and Cyon the Mind Reader. The game would be controlled by other beings in The Inverse, a realm designed expressly for such games.

Cyon's smug smile widened as he assumed his human form for this game. What is Hyperchain Chess, exactly? What are the game's rules and limitations? How is it possible to outwit a mind reader, let alone a high-omniscent mind reading god?

Well, let the games begin.