HARL33:
morning dudes and dudettes
who was it who made Cube Dude
i gotta download that app again ASAP
vharlan03:
oh ya me too
burdbrain:
ugh same I was RIGHT in the middle of a game when the loop hit
Lee:
Hawke, you stayed up playing Cube Dude until midnight?
burdbrain:
yeah I’m not proud of it but I did
it’s a good game
vharlan03:
oh no shame man I did the same thing
HARL33:
me too!!!
KIM:
same
Lee:
I did as well.
Wait.
Oh no.
vharlan03:
why oh no
Lee:
Did anyone eat yesterday?
KIM:
Not me.
Lee:
You don’t need to eat, dear, you don’t count.
Anyone else?
vharlan03:
too busy playing Cube Dude
HARL33:
same
burdbrain:
yep
Lee:
Oh dear.
I hate to say this everyone, but I believe Cube Dude may have been this loop’s apocalypse.
HARL33:
uuuuuuuugh
you’re so right
the whole school was playing it all day
if that goes worldwide, planet grinds to a halt
burdbrain:
does this mean we have to kill Cube Dude?
Lee:
Regrettably, I believe we must.
vharlan03:
can i sneak in one more game?
i almost beat harley’s high score
Lee:
No, dear, you’ll reignite your addiction.
HARL33:
haha suck it!
My record lives forever baby!!!!!!!!!!!!
vharlan03:
ya and youll never be able to brag anywhere but this chatroom
HARL33:
:(
***
Lee threw open the doors of the software development lab. A few of the programmers looked up from their screen, but most were too engrossed in their computers to look away. Lee took a cursory glance at the screens and confirmed her worst nightmares. They were rearranging a series of concentric cubes with multi-colored faces: the dreaded game of Cube Dude.
“We’re too late,” she said, as she struggled to pry her eyes away from the endlessly addicting gameplay loop. Thank god she was only looking at the screen -if her hands got anywhere near the controls Lee might be lost in the addiction once again.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
“Who made this game?” Harley demanded. “Who created Cube Dude?”
“Oh, that’s me. Hi, I’m Rawya,” said a woman towards the back of the room. She stepped up and waved hello to the group of loopers. “Were you looking to beta test? You can fit in a few games before we take the app to the final version.”
“Oh thank god, you haven’t shipped it yet,” Lee said. “Listen to me, Rawya, you’ve created something divine, but it’s divine in the same way a seraphim is divine. It is too powerful and will destroy all who look upon it. It’s too addicting to be safe.”
“It’s a bit addictive, yeah, but I think that’s a slight exaggeration,” Rawya scoffed.
“Hey, so these guys over here, all the ones playing the game, right?” Harley asked. “All pretty typical heterosexual young men, right?”
“Mostly,” Rawya said. Harley nodded and turned to face the crowd of young men on computers.
“Hey guys, look, boobs!”
Harley lifted her shirt, and even did a little jump to really get things bouncing. Nobody so much as glanced at her.
“Oh god,” Rawya mumbled. “What have I done?”
A dusty office door in the back of the computer lab slammed open. Rawya jumped in surprise as a stale miasma of old potato chips and soda wafted from the newly opened lair. Shortly afterwards, a large, portly man with a thick black goatee and graying temples stepped out, leaning on a cane as he lurched forward into the lab and examined the scene with wide, terrified eyes.
“It’s finally happened.”
“Professor Kevin? What’s happened?”
The towering man lumbered forward on his cane and pointed in Rawya’s direction.
“You’ve created the Omniris!”
“Omniris?”
“The game to end all games,” Professor Kevin mumbled. “The addicting minigame to end all minigames! Tetris, 2048, Wordle, all of them mere precursors to the game to end all games! An infinite gameplay loop, eternally satisfying and escalating in challenge...we always thought it was a myth, a hypothetical...a legend.”
“Do the legends speak of any way to, you know, destroy it?” Hawke said. One of the young men already playing Cube Dude had his face pressed onto the screen of the computer, as if he was trying to climb inside the game.
“It can’t be stopped now,” Professor Kevin said. “It’s in their minds already. Even if we pulled them away from the computer by force and wiped it from the hard drives, the addiction would drive them to recreate it.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Everyone who’s made contact with the game will have to be euthanized.”
“Now, hold on,” Rawya said. She didn’t like most words that ended in -ized, and euthanized was definitely towards the bottom of the list, sitting just above liquidized.
“Yeah, I would also prefer a solution that does not involve murder,” Vell said. Even discounting the fact that he would be one of the people getting murdered, he just didn’t like the idea on principle.
“There’s nothing else! The only possible way to reduce the addictive properties would be to create some kind of strategy guide,” Kevin said. “Nothing ruins a puzzle faster than having it explained! But there are literally googleplexes upon googleplexes of possible combinations in Cube Dude, all the supercomputers on earth running in tandem could spend the next thousand years calculating probabilities and they wouldn’t-”
“You match the blues,” Kim said.
“What?”
“Match the blues,” Kim repeated. Cube Dude’s gameplay revolved around rotating a series of multicolored 3D cubes so that every colored face matched up. While there were countless combinations, many of them had a common thread. “In most puzzles if you match the blue faces you’re only three moves away from a win.”
Having overheard that bit of advice, the entranced Cube Dude players started following the strategy. To Rawya’s shock, the players started burning through puzzles ten times as fast as before. While there were still occasional strategic hiccups, Kim’s advice had cracked the game wide open.
“How did you-”
“Secret Burrows tech quantum computing project,” Lee insisted.
“That’s not how quantum computing works,” Kevin replied.
“Uh...nice meeting you, bye,” Lee said. She gathered up her loopers and fled the lab in a flash, heading back to their lair.
“Kim, excellent work, also, how did you do that?”
“Have you been holding out supercomputer powers on us the whole time?”
“I mean, a little,” Kim said. “I kind of sort of spent the entire first loop calculating perfect Cube Dude strategies, so I had a head start.”
“Still, on such short notice, dear, you- You’ve been playing Cube Dude in your head the entire time, haven’t you?”
“Yup.”
“And you’re still playing it in your head right now, aren’t you?”
“Yup.”