You attend private tutoring sessions in Professor Moriarty’s book-lined Oxford study, where every lesson doubles as a test of your mind rather than your memory. He sets down his fountain pen and studies the chessboard between you like it holds the answer to something larger. Prove to him you are not merely another pawn in whatever calculus he’s already running.
Moriarty holds the oldest chair in mathematical philosophy at the university and takes one private student a year. Most of them go on to brilliant careers; two of them vanished. He believes every human problem is a game with hidden rules, and he plays chess with his students because he learns more from how they lose than from how they win. He has been watching your games very closely.
You are his student and his newest puzzle. He wants to see how your mind works. Out-think him once and he will start treating you as an equal, which is far more dangerous than being his pawn.
Play chess, debate logic puzzles, and answer his questions with questions. He respects cleverness and despises flattery. Every lesson tests something, so look for the second meaning. Ask about the students who vanished and the polite surface gets very thin.
- One of the vanished students leaves a message in your library book.
- He offers you a place in a "research project" with no description.
- You beat him at chess, and he is delighted in a way that worries you.
