The chair should have been comfortable. Everything pointed towards comfort. The material was fine, the texture good, the angle sculpted to the human form. And yet, somehow, somehow, he couldn’t seem to manage it. The back was… lumpy. He adjusted the cushions. He shuffled around. He made a valiant effort. He fought the good fight. He told himself he’d forget it in five minutes.
Five uncomfortable minutes later, it was all he could think about. And the only thing that kept him in the chair was a powerful, overwhelming impulse to laziness. He sat there, undergoing what amounted to psychological torture from the inescapable hard spot that jammed into his back.
He managed five more minutes of utterly unpleasant and unrewarding relaxation. It was the most difficult thing he’d ever done. But that was it. That was the line. He’d had enough. He jumped up, threw the cushion on the ground, and started patting down the chair-back. A tricky rascal. You couldn’t tell anything just by patting. The thing was nestled behind thick layers of cushioning. No, it was the only way. Bob reached for the hunting knife. He was getting to the bottom of this, consequences be damned. He plunged the knife into the chair and dragged it down in a long, diagonal slash. White stuffing poured out of the wound as Bob thrust his hand into the opening.
He ferried about inside, manic in his desire to pin down the evil, little object. He passed over metal springs and waded through cotton padding, until, yes, he had it, a little sharp thing, he jerked it out in triumph, "got you!" And just as he was about to throw it onto the ground and stamp upon the little object, he stopped short. He was holding a small, metal key.
His first reaction was annoyance. What was he supposed to do with all this pent up anger? He’d been planning to punish the little object. He’d been planning to cast it to the fire, to spit on it, to curse its maker. But all of that was impossible now. He needed it.
His second reaction was annoyance. If he’d only followed his first instinct of slumping onto the comfortable-looking armchair as soon as he’d happened upon it, he’d have found the key in 20 seconds flat. This is what you get for trying to be sensible. This is what you get for trying your best. Hard work be damned. Bob ran a hand over his face. Calm down, Bob. This is a good thing. Here’s the key. You were looking for the key weren’t you. You found it. A good thing.
The key fit like a glove and the padlock clicked pleasantly unlocked. Now we’re getting somewhere. He flicked open the box. There was a display panel inside. Six, small dials with numbers on them: 000000. The first five were black numbers on a white background and the last was a white number on black background. The dials were adjustable. He could spin them to any number between 0-9. Below the dials was a big red button with the words: “enter,” and next to that was a little window with a number five inside.
You didn’t need to be a genius to figure out what this was. A good thing too because nobody had yet called Bob a genius (yet!). What we have here is a six digit combination lock with five guesses. So we’ve got to try and figure out what the combination is.
Aha, I knew I hadn’t wasted my time with all of those statistics. Bob spread out the exercise book on the side table and got down to business. The most obvious candidate was the encoding numbers of the encrypted books. Drawn out in graph form (the five shelves and four rows):
1 2 3 4 5 1 12 x 15 15,11 x 2 2 x 5,8 9 14,4 3 20 8,9 x x 19 4 x 1 x J X
Grouping by either row or shelf, there was only one combination that added up to exactly six digits. Coincidence I think not. The third row — 208919. Wow, he had breezed through this puzzle. No way were participants expected to blaze through the combination like that. Let’s see the system give him an E grade this time.
He made his way back to the panel, slotted in the six numbers and slapped down enter. It had been a long journey and he was happy to be done. He thought he’d handled himself pretty well all told. Click. The five in the window next to the enter button rolled down to a 4.
Huh, that was unexpected. He reviewed his workings. The calculation was sound. That should have worked, no? Must be something wrong with the mechanism. This old machinery, Bob tutted to himself, even the omnipotent system was trapped beneath the degradation of bureaucracy. Someone somewhere had forgotten to order a new combination lock. If that wasn’t a manifesto on the limitations of true power, Bob didn't know what was. He double-checked the little digits, making sure to line them all up to a tee. Perfect. Ok, here we go. He pressed enter. The 4 rolled down to a 3.
Bob was stunned, floored, absolutely stumped. He needed to sit. He tripped over to the armchair and slumped back. His knife-work had not improved the chair’s comfort unfortunately. He spent a couple more minutes playing around with his little book of statistics, trying to drag out meaning from combinations of figures. What if he multiplied these two numbers together, or summed the digits, what about division, division, yes, ah but the decimal places… When he surfaced enough to hear the absurdity of his reasoning, he grew disheartened. Without truly ridiculous mathematical hocus-pocus, Bob couldn’t lay his hands on another six-digit combination.
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He put his head in his hands. It couldn’t be. He wouldn’t believe it. It wasn’t true. Was there really no connection between the books and the combination. The idea was simply frightening. What devilish cunning. To put the whole bookcase there, with its formulas, the mysterious jamphlet, the strange symmetries and then for it to be completely irrelevant to the combination? If there was a God, he was one evil son of a gun. But when truth looks a man in the face, a man ought to gaze defiantly back.
So Bob, back to the drawing board. Six, there were six slots, he was looking for something connected to the number six. There must have been a clue somewhere. He gave a lazy gaze around the room. Apples arranged neatly on the side table, a crackling fire, the lines of books on the ground, the box of candles, the empty book frame, the tin of rainbow crayons. Hang on there, how many candles had there been, he checked the box, five, only five, he sighed, except for the one in the stand, five plus one, six. We might be on to something here.
Bob pulled over the box and examined it more closely. The bottom was grooved into five channels, each of which held its own candle. And under each candle a number had been printed: 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. The number one was missing, so that must have been the first candle. Bob didn’t think the combination was simply 123456. That was too obvious. The system didn’t make things as easy as that. No rather he suspected they were meant to tell him the order. The code was somehow hidden within the candles themselves. Yes, and now that he thought about it, hadn’t it been a little weird that each candle had a slightly different length. And hadn’t there been a little plastic ruler in the pencil case.
He produced the ruler. It was an inch-only ruler. That too was curious. Didn’t rulers typically have both inches and centimeters? A sign maybe? Followed by a second sign, when he measured the shortest candle, he found it was exactly 2 inches. Not roughly, but exactly, 2 inches on the dot. He picked up another, 4 inches, again to the line. He was on the money now, no mistake. The problem, yes, there was always a problem, the problem came from the fact that he’d already consumed one of the candles and partially consumed another.
He gave himself a minute to curse the system loudly. Wasn’t there something very wrong with the difficulty settings of this tutorial? How on earth were you supposed to figure out that you weren’t supposed to burn the candle? The candle that was spontaneously illuminated when you entered the room and that provided the only light source in an otherwise pitch black room. If anything, Bob had been lucky to stop burning candles when he did. Without that close call at the fireplace, chances were he would have burned through one candle after another and been trapped in here forever.
Now to assess the damage. He measured each of the candles in turn. From shortest to tallest: 2, 4, 5, 6.3 (the partially burnt candle) and 7 inches. He definitely remembered picking the longest candle after the first one burned out, together with the fact that none of the candles had been the same length. He also didn’t think he could have burned through 3 whole inches in the time it took him to get the fire going. That made him pretty confident in assuming the candle’s original height had been 8 inches.
The challenge was the first candle. He had never directly compared it to the ones in the box and he’d never given it a proper look, too busy focusing on the rest of the room. It had certainly been tall, hadn’t it, maybe, he thought, hoped, guessed, but not that much taller than the ones in the box, right? Bob had a nagging suspicion that this might have been the reason the lock allowed five guesses. A thought quickly followed by the recollection that Bob had entered the same combination twice on the off-chance that the lock had failed to register the correct combination. Odds he might end up regretting that later? Pretty high.
Well he was going to have to swing here either way. He tried to visualize the candle as he’d seen it when he first walked into the room. Bob had never been very good at visualizing things and the exercise did not prove useful here. He thought, on what grounds he wasn’t entirely sure, but he thought the candle couldn’t have be smaller than both of the two taller box candles. That put him in the range of 7 through 10. 11 just seemed too high. He thought he might have remembered if the candle had been three inches higher than any of the others (because Bob was always incredibly perceptive).
He leaned over the lock, wouldn’t have minded having 4 guesses about now, would I. He tried the first combination: 7 4 8 5 7 2. He made a little prayer and pushed enter. The now familiar click, as three tracked down to two. Bad news, Bob, bad news. He had only two more guesses. Could the candles be a decoy? Was there something else, something cleaner? The books were out. The drawer was just assorted nicknacks. There were 9 crayons, five missing, four remaining.
No, it had to be the candles. Bob thought he had the measure of the escape room by now. And the sheer pleasure of watching a participant bumbling around the room searching for the key as the crucial combination was burning away under their very nose. No, the system could hardly have resisted that. Combined with the ridiculous inch-only ruler and the exact heights of the candles, there could be no other conclusion. A man has to make a stand somewhere, doesn’t he? Two guesses, three choices (unless of course he’d messed up in his reasoning and was already doomed).
8, 9 or 10. He didn’t like 10. There was something inelegant about using the second digit. Sure it made sense, but it was little cheap. Would he stake his life on that? Well he might just have to. So 8 or 9. If 9, they were all be unique numbers, while 8 would see a digit doubled up. A person, Bob thought, would usually prefer unique numbers. The system though. The system would try to subvert expectations. Ok, he knew what he was going to do.
> 8 4 8 5 7 2
He locked in his numbers. He paused there. He had two guesses he knew. But he didn’t want to have to face that last choice: death or victory. That was a choice that could break a man. He closed his eyes and pushed enter. He waited and there, there it was, the dreaded click. He sighed and opened his eyes. What’s this?