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What lies at the beginning of eternity, the end of time and space, the beginning of the end, and the end of everyplace? Most of you would assume the answer is God, but I can assure you I am no God. The idea that there could be a God responsible for this putrefying ball of excrement we call a planet is laughable, to say the least. So why pose such a confounding conundrum? To explain, this so-called "doctor of psychology" calling herself Trista Martin believes she is writing an article about me to try and explicate my accomplishments and persuade you they are those of an antisocial, unhinged, narcissist. Instead of imperiling you fine readers to such second-rate offal, I have taken the liberty of obliterating her previously written article from her home computer and distributing my own in its place, unbeknownst to her. For whom better to elucidate the riddle that is the Riddler than the Prince of Puzzles, the King of Conundrums, the Earl of Enigmas himself? How have I done this you may ask? I could explain it, but it would take far too long and I don't want to confuse you placid readers with the particulars of my remarkable feats, so I'll leave it a mystery for now.
Those of you reading no doubt trust my "criminal behaviors" and "anti-social conducts" stem from an abusive childhood. That would be an amusingly simple-minded assumption. If anything, my childhood is responsible for my great intelligence and keen sense of social manners. My father, while stringent, was not the drunken, abusive, ne'er-do-well living in a recliner surrounded by beer cans, as you people love to assume. He was a lawyer and would sooner cut his own fingers off than leave refuse out on the floor. However, if you seek an example of narcissistic behavior disorder, well he was a textbook case, believe me. He was one of those self-declared geniuses that always supposed he was the cleverest one in the room. Even my own mother divorced him within a year, after she'd had me of course, because he was so unendurable. She didn't even try to get partial custody of me because she knew she wouldn't stand a chance in court with him. So my father took it upon himself to elevate me and form me in his own faultless image. By the time I was out of diapers, when most kids were still besieged with understanding basic language, I had every president memorized by number, all the states and capitals, and most of the periodic table. My father would spend hours drilling me on everything, and I had to learn it, or I'd be castigated. If I got anything wrong, he would make me write for hours, copying law books and dictionaries, sometimes in languages I didn't understand. Anything not meeting his standards, which were of course phenomenally great, would result in another all-night session of writing Pi out to the 100,000th place or creating anagrams of historical figures names which reflect their character. He never hit me of course; he'd be terrified of hairline fractures or infections on his perfect hands. He'd do things like, take away my bed so I'd have to sleep on the floor of my room or just make me sleep in the bathroom so I couldn't read or have access to my computer all night. After one particularly bad week of quizzing, he turned my room into an extra office for himself, forcing me to sleep in the dining room for most of a semester. Sometimes he would wipe my hard drives clean, deleting weeks of work and countless hours of calculations and data. After he enacted that particular penance I started keeping a clandestine hard drive in the attic. He always knew how to get to you, always in fresh and imaginative ways. I think he really had a talent for it. He was obsessed, I think. He was trying to make me smarter than any other child, not for my own benefit, of course. He did it so he could boast to his lawyer friends and to the teachers. To show them how his "son" project was coming along.
You'd think someone who knew the multiplication tables at age 5 would be expected to skip a grade or two, but you'd be wrong. Father wanted me in the company of inferior minds so he could make sure everyone, both the children and the parents, would know how beneath me they were, how beneath him they were. Clearly this exacerbated my already deficient social eminences. Can you envision it? A powerful and original mind like mine entombed in the cattle yard of the education system? Required to answer obvious questions and listen to "superiors" explicate over and over what I already knew. My father forced me through all of it, never even considering I skip a grade or two even when the teachers implored him to let me. He specified it would test my focus and temper my aptitude for allocating with less significant minds. In addition he began enrolling me in intellectual extra-circulars. Spelling bees, chess tournaments, essay writing, science fairs, anything which offered status and tested me against other children my age. Meanwhile, my studies at home would go on, well beyond what they "taught" me in school, and my father, while not tiresome and monotonous like my "teachers" in school, was a much more unforgiving critic. In public I was a prodigy, but at home I was a simpleton. No matter how many perfect test scores and awards I'd receive; my father was convinced, based on my lackluster performance under his pitiless scrutiny, that I was only just toeing the line of mental normalcy. He would see my success is school and the outside world as evidence of the inexcusably low standards of excellence employed by our society.
It was around this time that I learned to cheat. Any test or contest, I had to perform to perfection or face reprimand. Even when I knew everything the test would ask me, I still went to great lengths to make sure I had a perfect score in the end. I could have passed those tests and "contests" with my eyes closed, but still, I had to be sure. And besides that, why waste my time demonstrating my acumen to these plebeians by retorting their obvious inquiries? It was more challenging and more gratifying to sidestep their pathetic procedures and principles to receive the required outcome my own way. The easy part was getting the answers. No one suspected the keenest adolescent in class of being a charlatan, so most of the time all I had to do was innocently request them. I'd tell the office attendant my teacher sent me to pick up the answer keys and she'd hand them right over. I'd tell the custodian I'd forgotten something in class and he'd unlock the doors for me and leave me to search the teacher's desk at my leisure. You'd be amazed how little people actually think about what is being asked of them. I've convinced restaurant owners to throw chairs through the windows of their own businesses by simply telling them over the phone that I worked for the fire department and that a gas leak had been detected, requiring them to vent the premises as soon as possible. Claims of authority and innocence are never questioned by the vast majority of the irrational apes that make up this species. People believe that I possess some omnipotent knowledge of computer software that allows me to access their information, when all it really takes to get a password or IP address is a phone call and a hapless salaryman. Once I had the information, getting it to the test or into the contest was a different challenge. I had fake labels for water bottles printed up with the nutrition and fine print replaced with the answer key. I would even write the answers on the inside rim of my glasses using a needle and white out. My favorite method was rewiring my ordinary calculators to display information when certain keys were pressed. Learning to cheat also taught me how to steal and this quickly became a passion of mine. I wouldn't steal items from stores or other students. That was for brutes. I stole information. I had cracked the databases of every school I attended, giving me access not only to grades but the permanent records of my classmates. This gave me power over them for the first time. Having the highest grades did nothing to impress the vacuous commonalities of the schoolyard, but having embarrassing information or the ability to add or subtract from their grades or records, well, let's say I made a lot of "associates" and "nemeses" from then on.
It was around this time I discovered my other passion. Riddles, puzzles, problems, conundrums, brainteasers, questions, mysteries, enigmas, and codes. My father, of course found such things juvenile and a waste of brain power, which only made my fixation grander. I would offer some of the lesser languishers of my ill-gotten information a chance to be free of my sovereignty if they could only solve one of my riddles. It was cruel, I admit it. It was only a way to make their hopeless subordination to me more unpleasant by offering them an escape they could never accomplish. I began developing my own languages, both written and spoken, and began writing my answer keys in them, even writing small confessions in the margins of my test in my secret code, just to give these poor chumps a sliver of a chance to catch me. No teacher ever figured it out, of course. This I found to be the utmost cerebral triumph. Not only had I outmaneuvered their system but I'd given them the chance to stop me if only they had been canny enough to decrypt it. You people hear of my exploits and believe this to be a sort of self-sabotaging exhibitionism. You no doubt believe that I obtain some lascivious thrill from it. I'm only giving you less significant academics a chance to use those fallow wits of yours for your own subsidy. I'm only encouraging cleverness, with the thwarting of my misdeeds as the reward. After all, as I discovered as a child at all those contests, an achievement means nothing unless the game is fair.
My relationship with my father ended when I was 16. I remember him boasting about his IQ score all my life. He'd always claimed it was 135, well into the 98th percentile. He would go on and on about MENSA denying him membership out of spite or jealousy certain key members held for him. He claimed being denied entry into such a society was more compelling evidence of his superiority than even the most esteemed invitation to it would be. Upon finding out MENSA gladly takes anyone within the 98th percentile of the intelligence quotient, regardless of their caustic personality disorders, I managed to dig up his actual IQ score. I don't have to tell you it was far below the 98th percentile. I never told him I knew the truth about him. He wouldn't have believed it even if I brought him the papers attesting to it. He had long ago convinced himself of his own truth and had no doubt completely forgotten his original test result. I was given the intelligence quotient test when I was 16 and I, of course, scored significantly higher than even my own father's false claims. I won't divulge my own tested score, only that it was higher than a cosmologist with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and lower than an 11 year old Harvard Graduate. When he got the results, and my invitation to join MENSA, he was understandably upset. Convinced I'd cheated somehow, he claimed it had to have been a mistake. There was no way a dunce like me could score higher than he claimed he'd scored at the same age. Needless to say, I had to sleep in the hall closet for most of a month after that. Don't feel too bad for me though, I actually had cheated and both my score and the invitation to MENSA were faked. After the test I discarded my real test results and fabricated a new one with significantly high accolades. I then found the location of our local MENSA chapter house and purloined an envelope and letter head for the creation of my invitation. I wish I'd had the forethought to record or photograph the look on his face when he saw those papers. All of his dreams of having me grow up as a perfect reflection of himself, just smart enough to make him look smarter and just successful enough to make him look more successful, they all imploded when he realized he'd created a true genius, that I had been officially acknowledged to be smarter than he dared imagine himself to be. Like Victor Frankenstein in his lab, I was the monster he'd created out of his own hubris, greater than he could have imagined, so great it would destroy him. You couldn't imagine my glee. After a month of cold conversation and detachment, I decided my one time tormentor and adversary to be thoroughly defeated and set out to leave home and start life on my own. I haven't spoken to my father since, though I do check in on him once in a while, to make sure he's just as miserable now as he was when I saw him last. He of course has made no mention of me to his friends or associates since I left.
So, dear readers, how is it I came to be the man you see before you? Despite what the powers that be tell you, crime does indeed pay and cheaters always prosper. If you're simple enough to believe otherwise you don't deserve to be successful. But money means so little to the true intellectual, and gathering knowledge for its own sake is, in the end, self-serving and trite. I elected to find a different use for my vast mental arsenal. I decided to be an evaluator of intellectuals. I would use my incredible acumen to test the intellectuals of the world, to allow them the opportunity to prove their intellectual status. Instead of building my own academics endlessly, pointlessly accumulating petty currency and the honors of lesser minds, I decided instead to give back to the community of the cognoscente. Why then, you may ask, do you place them in personal peril in order to test them, rather than challenging them with harmless riddles and questions? As my father had taught me, your intelligence is only as useful as it is under the worst circumstances. I've never murdered anyone to date. Every one of my "victims" had the means of escape within their grasp. They were "murdered" by their own incompetence and unwillingness to accept my challenge. It's tragic really. In a world of equal minds, my trials would be capricious distractions at best.
So what then is the solution to the riddle posed at the outset of this soliloquy? The answer is simple. Me. What lies at the beginning of eternity, the end of time and space, the beginning of the end, and the end of every place is an E. Nigma. And as for the contents of your humble publisher's data bases, which they may find lacking a few key files, I will say this. What I found might readily be described as something you might want to share when you have it, but when you do share it you don't have it anymore. And if certain members of your humble publishing house would like those things to remain "unshared" and thus still in your "possession", you'll find a simple cypher in their place instructing you on how to go about making that happen.
Warmest Regards,
Edward Nigma