You land with a thump back in the cramped apartment where your journey began in 2009. Lady Gaga is still playing, but at least it’s moved onto Bad Romance now, suggesting that your century of fixing queer people’s seemingly trivial problems was not for naught. You were kinda hoping you’d done enough to earn your passage home, but obviously that pesky space-time continuum has one challenge left for you!
You see the same women sat by their laptops as before, but their furious typing has finished. They’re finally ready to hit go on autostraddle.com!! Suddenly there’s a blinding flash and a loud bang, almost like indoor thunder and lightning. There’s clearly some final-boss-level weird shit going on here as the lights go out, the only illumination from blue static crackling across the room.
The laptop screens cut out, and one of the women wails in despair, clutching a tiny stuffed chihuahua for comfort. You hop over to see if there’s anything you can do, and after one firm clonk the laptop flickers back to life. Sadly, such IT skills are not enough to get the website back up, and it keeps asking you for a passcode. The women have no idea what it could be! Fortunately, the time vortex is not completely evil, and throws up some clues…
Can you crack the passcode so Autostraddle can come into existence!?
The passcode is made up of 4 digits (0-9). No single digit is repeated in the passcode.
You are given five 4-digit numbers. Each number contains 2 digits that are also present in the passcode:
- 1 digit that is present in the passcode is in the same position as it appears in the passcode and;
- 1 digit that is in the passcode but is in a different position than it appears in the passcode
Here are the numbers:
A: 1234
B: 5613
C: 6427
D: 7318
E: 2584

A grid with 5 rows. Each row contains 4 digits making up a number. Row A is 1234, row B is 5613, row C is 6427, row D is 7318 and row E is 2584
What is the passcode?
Additional Tools:
A Printable Version of the Grid
A Complete Walkthrough of the Finale Puzzle!
Listen to Nicole describe the puzzle:
This one took me a while, but also made me feel like some kind of genius hacker. Thanks for all of this, Sally!
Solved this one with my grandma who used to be a math teacher! Thank you for the fun journey Sally!
<3 grandma!
Thanks for playing along!
My ex used to do all the puzzles in Myst and other games of that ilk. So I didn’t realize until now that number puzzles were great against insomnia ! I will not concede defeat ! Tomorrow…
This is the only one I haven’t been able to get!! Maybe I come back to it tomorrow…