Dopecentury VIII --- The Puzzle
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
The puzzle box fit well in the hand, at least if your hand were not grossly large or small as a child’s. Maybe roughly the size and weight of a baseball. But it was a cube, or at least cubular, if that could be a word. It unquestionably had corners. Though after some manipulations, those corners would occasionally get stuck in awkward places. And while most of the edges were linear, curves did sometimes manifest themselves, often annoying the puzzler with their persistence since it was clear that the solution to the puzzle was in its cube form, or at least its cubular form.
The puzzle box was black. Black inside, black outside. Black along the edges. Black where the mechanism that held it together within sometimes showed itself when the configuration was just right (or, more probably, just wrong). But it was all kinds of black. There were glossy black surfaces, that clearly needed to come together at some point to solve the puzzle. And the matte surfaces also obviously belonged together in the solution. Many puzzlers wondered about the edges, which often caught the light in a certain way with a bit of glare. Was the glare an indicator of edges that should be aligned? And then it was discovered that under particular colors of light, some surfaces glowed red, while others glowed blue. Suddenly a whole new dimension that needed to be managed to achieve the solution of the puzzle! Or maybe it was just a manufacturing flaw? Maybe the colors were irrelevant to the solution.
Puzzlers consulted with one another. To their great frustration, no two puzzles ever seemed to be in the same configuration — excepting the initial cube configuration, to which the puzzle could usually be reset without too much effort. Though clearly that configuration was the furthest possible point from the solution. Even two copies of the puzzle held next to each other and manipulated simultaneously with the same moves would invariably have small differences — an edge that slants down here on this one, goes up there on that one: how could that be? The only answer is that no two copies of the puzzle were exactly the same. Though those who understood the manufacture of mass-market objects thought this extremely unlikely.
How was the puzzle manipulated? Mostly by grasping a portion of it with one hand, and turning it against the portion held in the other hand. Very slight variations in where it was grasped and turned yielded wildly different results though, as did the degree to which it was turned. Serious puzzlers deemed a whole turn the most common move necessary to advance the puzzle, but partial turns were still a necessary part of the manipulation repertoire for someone trying to achieve the solution. On occasion, a full 360 degree turn was necessary and left the puzzle in a distinctly different state than before the turn. This suggested more complex workings inside the puzzle than initially thought possible from an object available at retail toy stores. (Some puzzlers were also adamant that in some places the puzzle needed to be turned twice or even three times around to move forward. But since the puzzle had been definitively solved numerous times with only a single full turn, multiple turns were considered an unnecessary complexity, if not apocryphal.) Indeed, some people thought the puzzle was beyond the capabilities of capitalism itself to produce.
The puzzle was entirely solvable. Almost everyone who seriously set out to solve it achieved the solution — the cube would be reformed, perfectly black on all sides with all the variations (even those seen under different colored lights) smoothed out into one consistent color, texture, and weight. The solution was both achievable enough — and combined with a distinct sense of progress in any dedicated puzzler — that the puzzle was extremely addictive. On any public transit in a major city, one might see hundreds of people staring down into the depths of the small black box in their hands, deftly manipulating it with the tips of their fingers, slowly but steadily moving towards the solution. Once in a while, someone would shout out with joy at having solved the puzzle, and other puzzlers would look up and smile and congratulate them and imagine the day they had their own accomplishment.
Despite being addictive and solvable, the puzzle was extremely difficult. It was noted that while one always had the sense that one was moving towards the solution, it was always easier to roll it backwards towards its initial unsolved-cubular-state than it was to move forward. Many puzzlers would deliberately take advantage of this, deciding that regularly starting from the unsolved state would get them to the solution more quickly that always pursuing the particular path they had initially set out on. They were not incorrect, but as noted above, it depended on their particular copy of the puzzle — if not on the puzzler themselves.
More unique than the features described so far was the fact that once the puzzle was solved, it could be reset to the unsolved state easily, and then the solution could be pursued again — but apparently requiring a wholly new, and apparently more difficult, approach. Puzzlers began to see these as “levels” and described them as such, so a puzzler who had solved the puzzle three times before might say to another, “I am working on level four.” Though it was clear that level four for one puzzler was different from level four for another puzzler.
This led to arguments about the fundamental nature of the puzzle. Some argued that it is an open system — it could go on forever, always changing and getting more difficult. There were milestones (solutions) but those were just markers along the way and there was no end point, just ever increasing difficulty. This notion was extremely frustrating to traditional puzzle people, because for them pleasure was derived from closed systems, in which, no matter how complex or how long it took to solve, there is always an end-point, a destination, a solution complete.
Others argued that it wasn’t a true open system, but a very large circular one. Like cat’s cradle, there might be a number of solutions and configurations, but eventually it would come around and repeat itself. Many argued that the puzzle had to be like this. The only way it could not be is if it contained some inherent element that could draw on pure randomness to generate each level of the puzzle. This was thought to be extremely unlikely if not impossible for a mechanical device widely available to consumers.