PI Harry Pi investigates the Maharaja Conjecture

First case

Previous case

Harry Pi, trenchcoat damp with last night’s regrets, leans against the flickering lamppost outside The Hatstand club. He speaks like a man who’s seen too many variables and not enough constants.

"I need your help Harry. Who else can I turn to. Word on the street, Harry. The truth is your game. And no job is too surreal". Sally exhaled a curl of smoke shaped like a question mark. 

“I’ll give it a go” he muttered, voice like a broken metronome.

“Got my quota in yesterday—two disappearing mathematicians and one radius too wide.”

He flicks a spent match into the gutter, watches it spiral like a Fibonacci whisper. 

“Truth’s a circle, see? You chase it long enough, you end up back where you started.”

She slipped a napkin into his pocket. On it: a lipstick print, and the words “They’re folding the truth, Harry. Inside out and people are non existing.”

He adjusted his tie, the colour of dried blood, and stepped back into the fog. 

“Trying’s just habit in this line of work. Success? That’s extra.”

The fog hadn’t lifted since Tuesday, and neither had Harry Pi’s mood. Sally’s silhouette lingered in his mind like a half-solved equation. Smoke shaped like a question mark? That wasn’t just style—it was signal.

Harry Pi hadn’t slept. Not properly. Not since the napkin. The lipstick print still pulsed faintly in his coat pocket, like a heartbeat in a parallel dimension.

“They’re folding the truth, Harry. Inside out. And people are non-existing.”

Not missing. Not dead. Just... unwritten.

He lit a cigarette with a match from The Hatstand. The flame spiraled once, then vanished. Fibonacci again. Always Fibonacci.

He studied the napkin. It was distorting visually and sonically. He listened harder.

The distortion was whispering a name in static: Echo Jones. A sound engineer turned myth manipulator. They said he built a machine so powerful it could warp reality into silence trapping a person in a single moment forever—played back, folded, erased.

Harry found Echo’s lair behind a jazz club that didn’t exist on Thursdays. Inside: mirrors, cables, a reel-to-reel machine humming in reverse and a central console pulsing with low-frequency dread.

The room vibrated with a sound you couldn’t hear—only feel. A hum that made your memories flicker.

On the waveform display: Sally’s voice, stretched and folded into sonic origami.

“Harry... help... fold... fold... fold...”

Echo emerged from the shadows—wearing a cracked leather jacket, headphones slung around his neck like a noose of forgotten truths. His boots clicked like metronomes on the concrete.

“You’re too late, Pi,” he grinned. “She’s part of the unreality now. A probability. I tuned her into the Maharaja Conjecture.”

Harry lit a cigarette. “You looped her into a lie.”

Echo reached for the console. “Truth is a frequency. I just modulate.”

Harry stepped forward, trenchcoat swirling like a wax phonograph B-side. “You forgot one thing. I don’t chase truth. I corner it.”

He flicked the match—Fibonacci spiral—it fell and jammed the console’s feedback port. The sonic unreality field buckled, shrieked, and collapsed in on itself.

Echo screamed as his own voice folded back on him, trapped in a feedback loop of guilt and jazz.

The speakers cracked. Sally reappeared mid-sentence, like a comma in a forgotten paragraph.

Back at The Hatstand, Sally stirred her drink with a flaming feather.

“You stopped Echo,” she said.

Harry adjusted his tie. “Didn’t stop him. Just broke the field.”

She smiled. “So what’s the Maharaja Conjecture, really?”

Harry sipped his drink. “It’s an Interdimensional theory. Says if you riff hard enough, reality improvises back. But in which dimension? That is the mystery.”

“The Maharaja Conjecture,” he said, “isn’t written in any book. It’s an interdimensional whisper scribbled on napkins during harmonica solos.”

Sally exhaled smoke shaped like a treble clef.

“It says reality’s not fixed. It riffs. You tell a story loud enough, with enough rhythm and myth, and the universe starts to improvise back. Fold truth the right way, and it disappears. Fold it wrong, and it sings.”

Sally raised an eyebrow. “So it’s a theory?”

Harry shook his head.

“It’s a performance. A tabla beating paradox. The Maharaja Conjecture doesn’t ask what’s real. It asks who’s listening.”