Though she had stopped asking questions, Little Rich still had a few of his own. More precisely, he had many things he wanted to ask, but for now, he kept it simple and went straight for the most important one:
"Uncle Slade, what exactly does CAAT stand for? It doesn't seem to be one with that Crown. It isn't actually the Crown itself, is it?"
From the moment he learned of CAAT's existence, and later received the information provided by The One Above All, the boy had been thinking through and calculating this question. No matter how he calculated it, he felt that the Crown was simply too concrete.
Things that could form concepts were generally abstract—for instance, dreams, time, death, Chaos, and so on.
Only terms defining things that could neither be seen nor touched, yet were intimately tied to human life, could be called concepts.
But the Crown Above All Things? A Crown that took on different appearances above different worlds was far too concrete. So Franklin had begun to suspect that the Crown was merely a fourth trait alongside the three elements of "thought," "consciousness," and "spirit"—"manifestation."
CAAT could manifest the concrete image of a Crown, but the Crown was not CAAT itself. It was that simple.
Yet this hypothesis had instead trapped Little Franklin, who had not accompanied Deathstroke on the journey into Mystery, in a logical loop.
If CAAT was not the Crown, then what exactly was it? At present, aside from the Crown, all people could see was a mass of black mist. This formed a strange equation, something like X = X + Y. Since X was a tangible thing, it certainly could not equal zero—but how could one solve for X's precise value?
Mathematics was actually a very useful cognitive tool when