某物結成

hubris.

i’m looking at my keyboard right now, trying to decide if there’s a way to use it to express my feelings. there’s an interesting shape over the 6^ key, but when i press it the keyboard’s backlight gets brighter. the shape appears on the screen but then it goes away, it doesn’t produce that shape in this text field.

i’m captivated by this row of characters:

`~!@#$%^&*()_+-=

those i can see. with secret alchemical knowledge and an extra finger, i can tease out a mysterious second set:

`⁄€‹›fifl‡°·‚—±

if i stare at them too long the keyboard light turns off and the screen dims. power saving, can’t let backlights drain the battery longer than necessary even if they _are_ super efficient.

there’s a key down here that seems most suited to my task. here it is:

?
/

a question, a division. free association: separation, exclusion, exclusivity. gravity, petty, petticoat. to make sense of previous set, those two characters may prove valuable. what? asking enough questions, getting the right answers. crack the case. abstractions/come/hard/and/fast, slash them up to make sense of them. rearrange if necessary.

yessir, that there key and them two next to it give us the tools of the detective:

,./?

now we can crack almost any case. currency symbols are variable based on the localization of your hardware. i’ve revealed mine, yours is probably different. free association: “i’ll show you mine if…”

what happens if i use alchemy on our detective key?

¿

ah. the solution of the case. we had an assumption the whole time, but it was wrong. at the last minute, the error is revealed. we have turned the question upon its head, the scales and rose colored glasses fall from our eyes. the truth is now apparent.

or is it? the question, when played backwards, can sometimes have the same answer. the tools have assisted us in our inquiry, we have turned our questions on their heads and perhaps found them still capable of holding water.

with a grand theatrical gesture, the solution is thus presented:

we began with noise, gibberish, muddled footprints and smudged fingerprints, no conclusive dna sources or fiber, nothing on the tapes. let’s review what we had. that’s these guys:

`~!@#$%^&*()_+-=`⁄€‹›fifl‡°·‚—±

what a mess. using our detection tools ,./? we rearranged those, questioned them, sent samples to the lab, followed the money, built theories and took them apart again.

but then ¿ happened. none of that other stuff was relevant to the case. it was really this one simple thing over there that you were looking at the whole time. never quite rang true.

big cases break because of small inconsistencies, little questions turned upside down. never know what it’s gonna be. keep your eyes open. use your tools ,./? to make the problem smaller and look at it a lot of different ways, but keep an eye out for ¿ and trust your gut when you get there.

go forth, young detective, and dissect your world. there’s questions out there you haven’t even dreamed of asking. ask them all.