The Room

They call me a riddle-breaker, though I never asked for the title. It started years ago, when I unraveled a shipping manifest that stumped a room full of suits—too few clues, too much noise. Word spread, I suppose, because every so often—once, maybe twice a year—two men in dark coats show up at my door. No names, no badges, just a polite “Come with us, Mr. Carver.” I know the drill by now. Sometimes it’s the same pair—tall one with a scar on his jaw, short one with a twitchy eye. They don’t talk much, and I don’t ask. I grab my bag—pens, notebooks, camera, a battered old compass—and follow.


Last time was different. The drive was long, hours bleeding into a flight I couldn’t track, blindfolded for the last leg. The air smelled wrong when we stopped—too dry, too thin, not North America. They led me into a warehouse, or what felt like one, the echoes of my steps swallowed by a vastness I couldn’t see. When the blindfold came off, I was alone in The Room. Hundreds of clear cubes lined the walls, spiraling out from a central pillar like a galaxy of glass. Each one held something—rocks, liquids, gases, objects, photographs—suspended in perfect stillness. My supplies waited on a table: paper, pencils, a digital camera with no uplink. They’d locked the door behind me. Two days, they said. Figure it out.


I started slow, snapping pictures, sketching what I saw. A cube with a lump of coal sat next to one with a swirling violet gas. Another held a diamond, glinting under the harsh lights, while its neighbor bubbled with a tar-black ooze. I paced the spiral, counting cubes, noting patterns. Hours in, my legs ached, but my mind hummed. The center cube was a single flame—steady, unburning, like a star caught in a jar. Everything radiated from there, a logic I couldn’t yet grasp.


The breakthrough came on day two, bleary-eyed and halfway through a stale sandwich they’d left me. The cube with carbon—coal, oil, tar sands, diamond, a flake of graphene—clicked it into place. Elements. This was their periodic table, but not ours. I backtracked, rechecking each cube. Hydrogen wasn’t first; it was thirteenth, a pale gas dwarfed by stranger things—shimmering dust, a liquid that bent light, a cube of nothing that somehow weighed on me when I stared too long. Their chart didn’t start with the simple building blocks I’d learned in school. It began with forces—raw, primal, older than atoms. Our elements, they seemed to say, were just echoes, combinations of these deeper things knocked out of balance.


I scribbled faster, piecing it together. The cubes spiraled outward, past uranium, past the transuranic oddities we’d synthesized, into hundreds more. A glowing shard in one, a feather that pulsed in another, a photograph of a starfield with annotations I couldn’t read. Their universe wasn’t static. Everything—rock, air, us—was temporary, a fleeting ripple in a sea of equilibrium. Some balances snapped back in microseconds; others might outlast the stars. But it all returned to zero eventually, a ground state beyond matter. And in that meantime?


They’d built wonders. The objects hinted at it—tools, fragments, things that screamed “interstellar” without saying a word.


The men came back after forty-eight hours. I handed them my notes—pages of diagrams, photos, a theory scrawled in the margins—and they nodded, wordless as ever. Back home, I spent months typing it up, my fingers aching as I translated the spiral into something coherent. Then I let it go. Life returned to its quiet rhythm: coffee on the porch, bills in the mail, the hum of a small town. But I couldn’t unsee it.


I dug into the web and X, chasing whispers of companies pushing boundaries—nanotech, energy, starships. The cubes beyond our table weren’t just theory; they were a roadmap. I sank my bonus into a few stocks—firms tinkering with graphene, others chasing fusion. Not for me, mind you. My grandkids, Ella and Jonah, deserve a piece of what’s coming. A feather that pulses could power a ship to Alpha Centauri. A shard that glows might light a colony. We’ve barely scratched the surface, and they’ll need every edge I can give them.


The men haven’t knocked since. Maybe I solved it too well, or maybe they’re waiting for the next puzzle. I keep my bag packed, just in case. The Room changed me—not because of what it held, but because of what it promised. Everything’s temporary, sure. But in the meantime, we can do amazing things.