It was one of those days. The ones when you feel a little lost, and you’re looking for something. You just don’t know what it is. It’s just a nagging little voice in the back of your head.
As I walked down the street, my eyes wandered here and there. Store windows, people, traffic. Searching. I sighed as I watched it all. The mundane bustle of urban life. Then, out of the corner of my eyes, I saw it. A book store nestled between two enormous office buildings. I stopped, staring at it. It was a small, cozy-looking place, surrounded by a laid back atmosphere.
A few moments later, I stepped inside. I wasn’t a big reader, and neither was I a collector. I just liked to browse, and every once in a while, I bought something on a whim. One of my shelves was filled with two dozen books I’d found that way. Not to read them, but because of their titles, the covers, or the feeling they gave me. It was always odd books. That’s what I liked the most, odd little things you add to your home to give it a little more character.
The old man at the counter gave me a friendly nod.
“Looking for anything specific, young man?”
“No, just browsing,” I said with a smile, and continued past him.
The store was purest chaos. Ramshackle bookshelves lined the walls, their wood straining under an unevenly placed load. I saw novels, picture books, children’s books and nonfiction, all thrown haphazardly with no rhyme or reason. Here and there books littered the floor, and in certain corners, I found dusty, towering stacks that seemed to shake with my every step. I smiled. The place sure had its charm.
For half an hour I wandered the store. It was much bigger than I’d thought. It comprised multiple backrooms, each one more chaotic than the last. I leafed through multiple books before something caught my eye. At the bottom of another stack, half-hidden behind an old reading chair, I saw a giant tome. It was bound in thick leather, but there was no indication of what it was. No words lined the spine. One by one, I removed the books on top, but to my surprise, the cover was similarly empty.
When I opened it, I found it even thicker than I’d originally thought. As I went to the end of the book, I noticed the page count far exceeded two-thousand. What can I say? This strange book intrigued me.
As I looked through it, I noticed each page comprised multiple, short bodies of text, neatly divided, each with a title of its own. At first, I thought it was a book of anecdotes, or maybe quotes by famous people, but when I read one of the section titles, I looked up.
You Step Into the Dark Forest, one of them said.
You Ascend the Stairs, the one below read.
A little confused, I went to a different page and read another one, only to find a similar title above.
You Roast the Remains
Even more confused, I read the text below.
You construct a small cooking fire from the stones around you. It takes you a few minutes, but you succeed in lighting it. You carefully begin roasting the strange meat. A weird, sweet smell fills the air. Finally, the meat looks ready to eat. What do you want to do?
Eat the meat. Go to page 219.
Throw it into the fire. Go to page 811.
Leave the fire and the meat behind. Go to page 86.
It took me a while to realize what I was holding. It had to be one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. I smiled a little, but couldn’t help but wonder at the immense size of this monstrosity. A Chose Your Own Adventure book of this size? There was no way. Maybe it came with illustrations, maps and a list of items and enemies. Hell, maybe it was a collection of different adventures. Yet as I went through it, I found nothing but text. No maps, no illustrations, and no divisions. When I checked the first page, it was the same as all the others. No table of contents, no title, nothing.
What an odd book, I thought. Odd, but interesting. I picked it up, and holding my price, I went back to the front.
When I approached the old man, he looked up again. For a moment, something washed over his face, but a smile instantly replaced it. As I put the heavy book down, the counter creaked audibly under its weight.
“Well, you’ve picked quite the book, young man.”
“It looked interesting.”
“Sure does, doesn’t it?”
“It’s one of those old Choose Your Own Adventure Books, right?”
The old man nodded.
“So, why’s it so big?”
“Because it’s hard.”
“Hah, very funny.”
I laughed, but the old man didn’t join in.
“You ever gave it a try?”
“Sure did.”
“What’s the deal with it, then?”
The old man shrugged.
“There’s a reward at the end.”
“You finished it?”
Another shrug. I opened my mouth, intent on pressing him, but then let it slide. No reason to pester him any longer than necessary.
“How much is it?”
The old man thought about it for a moment.
“Tell you what, how about five bucks? Not like anyone else is going to buy it any time soon.”
A little surprised about the low price, I handed him the money before I tried to shove the giant book into my backpack. It almost didn’t fit. Only after some rummaging did I finally succeed. With that, I said goodbye and went on my way.
Once I was home, I opened the strange book right away. For a little while, I leafed through its pages before I went back to the first and started to read what I assumed to be the first chapter. I had to start right here, didn’t I? To my surprise, I wasn’t reading the beginning of the adventure, but a completely random part of it.
You Hold the Desert Orb High Into the Air
You raise the Desert Orb toward the sky. For a moment, it gleams in the hot, unforgiving sun before it crumbles in your hand. Nothing remains, but a set of thirteen colorful marbles that come to rest in front of your feet. What do you want to do?
Pick them up. Go to page 1522.
Stomp on them and destroy them. Go to page 772.
Throw them into the sky. Go to page 382.
Great, I can play with marbles. This wasn’t too exciting. Instead of picking any of the three choices, I went on to the next chapter. The second one was even duller, talking about a flower store in a small village. Yet the third one stood out to me.
You Wait in the Clearing
While you’re waiting, the Thousand-Eyed Dragon suddenly descends upon you, staring at you with its thousand eyes and basking you in their iridescent glow. The dragon closes in on you quickly. What do you want to do?
Stay and await the dragon. Go to page 522.
Pray to the Gods of the Earth. Go to page 311.
Run. Go to page 1899.
This was more like it. As for my choice, I ran and went to the back of the book to find page 1899. It was the fifth chapter on the page.
You Run from the Thousand-Eyed Dragon
You hurry away from the approaching beast. Your steps lead you through the dark forest, past gnarled trees and thick underbrush. Suddenly you fall, tripped by a root, and crash onto the forest floor. By sheer coincidence, your hand closed around a strange, glowing object. What do you want to do?
Pick it up. Got to page 455.
Destroy it. Go to page 390.
Ignore it and continue on your way. Go to page 111.
I picked up the object and had to return to the earlier parts of the book. The object turned out to be the so-called Ruby Orb. The glow of the object basked me in red light, and I could faintly make out something inside. I was asked once more what I wanted to do. The first two choices were to either stare into it, or to pocket it. The third choice made me look up.
Push the Amulet of Roe against it. Go to page 1023.
For a moment I hesitated, before I shrugged, and went with it. Sure, I didn’t know what this Amulet of Roe was or even if I had to find it first, but it sounded much more interesting than the other two choices. I searched for the corresponding page, only to read that I burst into flames and disintegrated. Well, great, I just died.
I went back and picked the choice to stare into it instead, only to read that I went stark raving mad. Great, another death, I thought.
This time I pocked the damned orb and went on my merry way.
I spent the next half hour continuing through the forest, only for my character to die half a dozen times because of cryptic references I had no clue about. At this point, I decided to take a break.
My stomach rumbled, and I realized I hadn’t even had dinner yet. I prepared myself a simple meal, comprising a few sandwiches, and put on a movie on Netflix. Sitting in front of the TV, I couldn’t help but stare back at the strange book. Its open pages were almost bidding me to come back, calling out to me to continue.
The moment I was done eating, I held it in my hands again. There was a certain kick to it, I had to admit. It was interesting trying to figure out your way. Instead of continuing where I’d left off, however, I went back to the confrontation with the dragon and picked choice number two to pray to the Gods of the Earth. To my surprise, the gods answered, and the dragon flew off. I was left to continue my adventure unobstructed. This time, I didn’t enter the forest, but followed a small path that led me past it.
This, however, didn’t change a damn thing. Half my choices ended in painful death, the other half made no sense or referred to objects I hadn’t heard about yet. There was talk about the Obsidian Sword, a treasure map, a Crown of Ice, and many other similar objects. Whatever I tried, I died as many times as in the forest. Hell, at one point, I was even transformed into a strange human-snake hybrid. I humored it for a bit, but was murdered by a group of knights.
When I followed another choice, my character became infused with elemental fire, only to evaporate when I tried crossing a river. Goddammit, I cursed to myself. This book was way too freaking hard.
Eventually, I got fed up with the damned dragon, the forest, and everything related to it. Instead, I went to a random page, and started reading from there. Who knows, maybe I’d have more luck there. What I read made me frown. Before, my character had been an adventurer in a fantasy setting, running through forests, hiding from dragons and traveling the land. Why was I suddenly in a… spaceship?
Either way, I picked one of the three choices only for my spaceship to explode. I went back, picked another one and followed this outlandish path for a while. It was as hard as the fantasy one. Once again, every other choice meant certain death, while the rest was filled to the brim with odd references. At one point, I was even assimilated by a hive mind. Even stranger, my character didn’t outright die, but I could continue on. I read a few more parts before I realized I’d spent almost two hours in front of the damned book.
Still, as confusing and terribly hard as it was, it was also damned interesting. There was something about it. With all the objects, and all the references, you could tell there were hints everywhere. You just needed to understand what they meant to progress further. I checked my phone and read a post on Reddit before I gave the book another shot.
This time, I opened it in the middle and absent-mindedly leafed through the pages for a while. When I started to read, I found myself at the home of a magus who offered me five different potions. I could only drink one, and below was a choice for all of them. I tried one and frowned when my character died again, this time from being poisoned. When I read another one, I was transformed into a creature of terrible power, the Thousand-Eyed Dragon. I’d read that before, hadn’t I? That was the dragon that had attacked me in the forest. Why did I suddenly turn into it? God, this was all way too confusing.
I was about to pick yet another potion when I noticed how late it was. Shit, I needed to catch some sleep.
When I got home from work the next day, I prepared myself some coffee, and before I knew it, I sat in front of the book again. I thought back to what I’d read before and gave the damned forest another try. It was probably best to start at a point I already knew about. This time, I had a plan. I’d write down the page number of each chapter I went through. That way, I reasoned, I’d have a simple way to backtrack my steps should I get stuck.
It wasn’t long before I realized this wouldn’t be enough. If I wanted to have any chance of figuring this confusing book out, I’d have to map out my way entirely. And so I wrote down not only the page numbers of the small chapters I went through but also the choices for each one of them, and the page they sent me to. Then I’d go through all of them until I found a way to continue.
I quickly stumbled upon another problem. There wasn’t just a single way forward, not even two or three. While many choices ended in death, almost as many sent me off in different directions. For the next days, I mapped out the forest, the areas around it, and eventually the small fantasy world I was supposed to be in.
I can’t say why I put so much effort into it, but once I’d started, and the first few pages were covered in notes, there was this strange voice in my head urging me to continue. After all, I had done so much already, hadn’t I? I couldn’t stop now. Even more so, the book fascinated me, had me spellbound. For the longest time, I’d just stumbled through life one day at a time with no goal or ambition. This book was the first interesting thing I’d come upon in years and I was set on solving it.
As I continued mapping out my way, I soon realized that this adventure was even more complicated than I’d thought. I’d just mapped out another part of the fantasy world when I became aware that the chapters and choices I was following seemed oddly familiar. After I consulted my notes, I learned that I was back at a certain point I’d been at before. Without knowing it, I’d followed a freaking loop in the story.
After I’d left a small town near the forest, I’d continued on and made my way to a waterfall and a mystical cave hidden behind it, only to be sent right back to the same town. I laughed a little. The damned book had got me. This entire freaking waterfall and cave thing was only here to throw me off. It was a loop that would continue on endlessly. I put down a little footnote not to go to the waterfall again and moved on.
Soon enough, I realized the waterfall wasn’t the only such loop. There were more of them, and some even led into one another, throwing you off even further. Without my notes, I might have every well stumbled from one loop into another without ever making sense of it.
Eventually, I reached a singular path I’d not been on before. After a few more choices, and a few more deaths, I was back at the home of the magus. This time, I tested out all five of his potions. I knew the first one would kill me instantly, and the second one would transform me into the dragon. Of the remaining three, one didn’t do a damn thing, and I left the magus’ home behind. Another killed me yet again. The last one, however, proved far more interesting. After I’d downed it, I was asked if I wanted to ascend to another realm.
This time, I was greeted with a plethora of choices. Go to the Land of the Land of the Never-Ending Sea, Return to the Cradle of Mankind, Take to the Stars, and more than a dozen others. On a whim, I picked Take to the Stars. When I went to the corresponding chapter, I suddenly found myself aboard a spaceship. I looked up. This was the freaking spaceship I’d read about before! As I’d noticed before, this one was as strange and as hard as the fantasy world I’d been in.
Using my newfound way of recording my path, however, I slowly progressed through it. It was by sheer accident that I stumbled upon a teleporter after my ship crash-landed on a planet. The teleporter turned out to be similar to the magus’ potion. Each choice below represented a different button. As I went through the choices, I was disintegrated multiple times before I was teleported to a place between the realms.
Similar to the ascension chapter in the fantasy world, I was asked where I wanted to go. What picked my interest was the first choice, The Land of Magic and Dragons. To my surprise, I ended up standing in front of a burned down farm, the bodies of my dead parents lying next to me and about to set out on a grand adventure.
As I’d expected, the choice labeled ‘Take to the Stars’ sent me right back to my spaceship. When I chose the Cradle of Mankind, I awoke in a cave, now wearing nothing but a pelt. I read two more brief chapters and learned that this was some kind of Stone Age setting. I went back, tried the rest and soon realized that each one of them sent me to an entirely unique setting, or adventure path, as I came to call them. With the three I’d already tried, there were eleven in total.
1. The Land of Magic and Dragons – Fantasy
2. Take to the Stars – Space
3. The Cradle of Mankind – Stone Age
4. The Land of the Never-Ending Sea – Ocean and Pirates
5. The Ruins of Nevrath – Desert Ruins
6. The Peaks of the Sky – Mountains
7. The Grand City – City-State
8. Crossing the Rubicon – Ancient Rome
9. The Jungles of Ulthum – Jungle Tribes
10. Calmheim – Small Village
11. Lesh’turath – Underwater Civilization
I just stared at my notes. This was crazy. It had taken me almost a week to map out the fantasy path, and another two to stumble upon this teleporter. You’re telling me there were eleven in total?
Absentmindedly, I rubbed my temples to push away the phantom pain I felt when I thought about working my way through all of them. This would be way too much work. That evening, I left the book alone and went to bed early. I was way too frustrated to continue this.
The next day, though, right after work, frustration was replaced by motivation. It was as if a surge of dedication pulsed through me. I knew I could do this. All it would take was time, and I had more than enough of that. After some deliberation, I tried my luck with The Cradle of Mankind next. I read chapter after chapter, got eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger, killed by a tribesman, found a magic stick, got empowered by a meteoroid, and finally found a strange glowing object. I went with the choice to pick it up and look at it, only to frown.
You stare at the strange glowing object and within moments, you recognize it as the Ruby Orb, a ghastly artifact from another realm. Only those who destroy it will learn its secret. In fear, you leave it behind and wander on.
The Ruby Orb? Hadn’t I read about it in the fantasy path? I went through my stack of notes frantically. There it was, in the damned forest. I noted down the place I was at and went back to page 1899. This time I picked the choice to destroy it and went to page 390. The chapter this time was short, and there was only one choice at the bottom.
You throw the orb to the ground. With a thunderous roar, it bursts and explodes into fourteen pieces. You stare at them in utter indifference before you decide to leave them behind.
Continue on your way. Go to page 111.
I rechecked my notes. This was the same freaking page I was sent to if I didn’t even pick it up. What the hell was this bullshit? Why was there a meaningless chapter like this? No, wait, maybe it wasn’t meaningless. There’d been something about a secret. Yet all the chapter said was that the damned thing burst into pieces. Frustrated, I was about to return to the Stone Age path. Then I stopped. It hadn’t said that the orb burst into pieces. It had said that it burst into exactly fourteen.
Oh, you’ve got to be freaking kidding me, I cursed, and went to page 14. The first two chapters were completely unrelated, but the third one stood out.
The Secret of the Ruby Orb, I read.
What I found below, however, made no sense at all.
The secret of the Ruby Orb lies hidden between the births of two men of genius. One, a writer most famous, no other than John Milton. The other, an astronomer who should change the world, Galileo Galilei.
I read it once more, than a third time, before I slumped down, utterly confused. Why the hell was the book bringing up Milton and Galileo? This made no freaking sense! Between the births… what was that even supposed to mean? I spent the rest of the evening trying to make sense of it. Did Milton and Galileo come up as characters at some point? But wasn’t the book set in fictional realms? At least, it seemed that way. Could it be that one of the more mundane sounding paths included them? If so, what was this about births?
God, none of this made any sense. That’s what I thought until an idea popped into my head the next day while I was at work. What if it wasn’t referring to the book, but to their actual births? I leaned back in my office chair, took out my phone, and googled them.
John Milton was born on December 9th, 1608, while Galileo Galilei was born on August 25th, 1609. Great, and how the hell was that going to help me? Then I thought about it. The freaking years, 1608 and 1609. The damned book had far over two-thousand pages. Was this damned riddle referring to certain page numbers? But how could there be anything between two consecutive page numbers? For the rest of the day, I entertained other, different ideas, different scenarios, like their location of birth, but they felt even less plausible.
The moment I got home, I threw aside my backpack and hurried to the book. I tore through the pages until I reached page 1608. I scanned the text, read through it, and even checked the margins, but there was nothing special about it. So it had to be the next one, page 1609. Yet when I turned it, I was suddenly on page 682. What the hell? I turned to the page after it, which was page 1609. At first, I considered it a misprint, but the text had mentioned a hidden secret between them. Was this a… secret page, then?
I started to read it. The page was filled with four chapters, but they differed from anything I’d read in the book so far. They seemed to be completely unrelated to the adventure. It was descriptions of the various stars in the night sky. Yet there was one line that stood out to me.
There are many a star in the sky, but only a few of them shine brightly.
I sank back on the couch. Was this supposed to be another hint? Only a few stars shine brightly, I reasoned. There had to be something about stars, about some that shined brightly! Yet before I went on my search for stars, I had something else on my mind, something beyond the meaning of that line. This very secret page here. Did it mean that even some pages in the book were mixed-up?
This page here was page 628. Which would mean it was missing where it was supposed to be, right? Instantly, I leafed through the pages, but I found it right there. Page 628, containing normal chapters all related to the adventure, preceded by page 681, and succeeded by page 683. So this secret page I’d found was a double hidden somewhere within the book. At that moment, I wondered if there were more of them.
I slowly went through the next one hundred pages of the book. When I was done, I’d found three more of these secret pages. In sheer and utter frustration at this new, mysterious discovery, I put the book down and cursed to myself. This was freaking useless. The longer I continued, the more mysteries I found. How in the hell was anyone supposed to solve this thing?
Still, a few minutes later, I pored over those three secret pages. Maybe they contained a hint that would help me make sense of them. Yet they all turned out to be the same. They all talked about topics that had no connection to the adventure whatsoever. One talked about the different ages of the Earth, starting from the Precambrian. The second talked about the evolution of apes, and the last one about a certain subset of plants, roses, to be exact.
For a moment, I tried to come up with how those things might be related to the overall adventure. There had to be some sort of tie-in, something I hadn’t discovered yet. Maybe there would be an odd reference in one of them or in an adventure path I hadn’t explored yet. Then I fell back on the couch, telling myself this was impossible. What if the book’s solution had nothing to do with the adventure itself, but could only be reached via cryptic references and hidden details? What if the entire adventure was nothing but a giant red herring, only there to hide real clues?
No, enough was enough. I’d done all I could, and I’d not waste any more time with this bullshit. I pushed the book away and turned on the TV.
Not even half an hour later, the book was in my hands again. I cursed myself for doing it, but I couldn’t help it. I’d done so much work, I thought, staring at the stacks of notes on the couch table. No, I won’t give up. The problem was, I didn’t know how much or how little I’d already done, how far I’d come.
Eventually, I decided on a simple enough plan. If I wanted to get anywhere, I first had to decode all the eleven different adventure paths. This would be easy enough, I told myself. After all, it was nothing but trial and error, and watching out not to get caught up in any of the useless, ever-present loops.
I did exactly what I’d done before. I noted down the page numbers, the different choices, and made references whenever I found something interesting. This, however, would only work on a smaller scale. What I needed was to get a better view, a bigger picture. And so I started to not only map out, but visualize every individual adventure path. I started with a normal notepad, but those pages were way too small. Even after taping multiple together, it wasn’t enough. No, I needed bigger sheets of paper for that.
I was on my way to the mall a minute later, and once I arrived, I barged into the office supply store. After pestering an irritated clerk, I bought a stack of the biggest sketchpads they had available. I didn’t even look at the price. I just paid. With those, and new found motivation, I made my way back home.
The first thing I did was to determine the starting point of each different adventure path. This was easy enough. After that, I started with the first one, the fantasy path. Thankfully, I only needed to copy the notes I’d already taken and turn them into a visual map of the entire path. I wrote down the very first page number, added the three choices, connected those to the next, and so on.
Things quickly got complicated. I had to start over multiple times because there wasn’t enough space, not even on my huge new sketchpads. In the end, I had to resort to taping them together, creating giant, confusing maps of lines and numbers. I even kept a stack of notes, related to every single path, filled with all the objects, references and hints that seemed important. When I realized my living room table wasn’t big enough, I used the floor, before I eventually resorted to putting the enormous sheets of paper up against my living room wall.
Over the course of the next two weeks, I visualized all the eleven adventure paths, as well as their general connections. By then, almost my entire wall was covered in a giant, crazy mural of color-coded lines and numbers. When I was done, I stepped back and had a look at it. My god, there was so much. This was absolutely insane. It almost made my head spin and a nervous laugh escaped me. And yet, I was proud, more than proud of what I’d accomplished. With this, I was sure I was close to solving the book. I had to be.
The first thing I learned from this new approach was that none of the adventure paths had an actual ending. You either ended up back at the beginning or at one of the hubs, as I came to call them, which allowed you to switch to a different path. No final path existed, and neither a final chapter that told you that you’d made it.
That’s when I knew the solution was what I’d already feared. It wasn’t on the surfaces, and not part of the adventure, but hidden within it. The first of the secret pages had talked about stars. I knew what I had to do and began searching through my notes for references about stars. Although I couldn’t remember any, there had to be some. I was sure of it.
For the entire next day, I went through my notes meticulously, but I found no mention of stars anywhere. The word appeared nowhere in the damned book, except on this secret page. Then I thought of something else. That riddle about Milton and Galileo Galilei hadn’t been related to the adventure. What if the mystery behind those secret pages wasn’t either?
I laughed in misery. Just how much more insane could this book get?
I opened Wikipedia and found a list of the brightest stars in the night sky. It was a long list, containing star after star and name after name. Well, that’s great and all, but what the hell was I supposed to do with this? The same was true for the history of the Earth, the evolution of apes, and the page about roses.
Dammit, I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be looking for!
Then I took a step back and took a deep breath. Hold on for a moment, Todd, hold on. Sure, there was no information about when it was published, but it was an old book, right? The pages were yellowed, and it gave off the distinct smell that only old books held. It meant the damned thing had most likely been around long before Wikipedia existed. I cursed and closed my browser.
Maybe it was all bullshit. What if all those secret pages with their stars, apes, and plants weren’t even related to the mystery? What if they were just another red herring? Or, I thought, what if there was something else to them? What if it was similar to the overall adventure? It wasn’t their content that was important, but something hidden within them.
I instantly decided on a fresh approach. I had to find all these pages, and look for some sort of connection between them. When I was done the next day, I’d found fifty-three in total. They all talked about different, obscure topics, all unrelated to the adventure. I noted them all down, but I still felt like I was missing something.
Once more, I told myself to take a step back. Don’t get hung up on the content. Look for something else.
Over the course of another damned week, I tried to find as many of the small riddles that led to these pages. I found twenty-one. I analyzed them meticulously. All were unrelated to the adventure, and only pointed to the place the pages in the book could be found. It was all worthless.
When I abandoned this idea, at least for now, the book had been in my possession for over six weeks. I looked up, stared at my living room wall, at the stacks of notes, and wondered what the hell I was doing.
Why I was doing it?
‘There’s a reward at the end,’ the old man had said, but I knew I didn’t do it because of that. No, I just wanted to solve the damned thing.
But why?
To prove that you can do it, the little voice in the back of my head answered.
None of this is important, though.
Yet the little voice protested again. You’ve spent six weeks of your life on it.
Yeah, and that’s enough. I won’t fucking solve it, anyway.
With those words still on my mind, I stormed up to the damned wall. I tore down the first of the many pages, the first part of the ghastly mural of insanity, and began crumbling it. I’d barely started when I stopped and looked up.
It has been so much work, the little voice piped up once more. And I knew what it was saying, what it meant.
What if I’d discover something important the very next day? What if I came up with that single piece of information to solve it all, right after I’d destroyed it?
“No, put it back, put it back, you idiot!” I heard someone scream.
I jerked around, only to realize that it had been my very own voice.
Then I got down on my knees, and with shaking hands, I smoothed out the paper before I put it back. A sigh of relief escaped me. It was still all there. I thankfully had destroyed nothing.
Jesus, what the hell had I been thinking?!
After this outburst, I labored over the book for two more hours, sitting in front of a giant map of lines and numbers. I went through the Ancient Rome path twice, explored all the connections it had to some others, trying to find out if there was anything I’d missed.
When I finally looked up, I saw how late it had gotten. My eyes grew wide, and I cursed. It was past two in the morning. I had to get up for work in three freaking hours.
The next day, I was a mess. I was sleep-deprived and only functioned with strong coffee. Still, I almost dozed off twice in front of the computer.
“Long night, Todd?” one of my coworkers asked, giving me a little wink.
“You’ve got no idea,” I mumbled. “Those freaking secret pages are driving me insane.”
“Those… what? Pages? The hell are you talking about?”
“Oh, eh, nothing. Just a… movie I watched that got me thinking.”
He eyed me curiously for another second before he shrugged and walked off.
Shit man, keep it together. You don’t want to end up as the office nutjob. That freaking book was getting to me. No, not the book, the fact I wasn’t making any new progress. I felt myself getting mad just thinking about it.
“Freaking hell,” I cursed, and made another coworker look up.
“You okay there, Todd?” she asked.
“Yeah, just tired. Made a mistake, that’s all.”
For the rest of the day, I forced myself to keep my mouth shut, and not mutter about anything related to the book. Hell, I told myself not to think about it, but it was an impossible feat. Even when I stared at the screen and went through customer reports, my thoughts were with stars and apes, with dragons and freaking spaceships.
I spent the next few days in this strange purgatory of non-decisions and non-hints. I went through the entire book again, studied all my notes, and looked for references. Hell, I even followed all the paths backwards. Yet I didn’t find a damned thing.
At work, as I slaved away in front of yet another Excel-document, copying and pasting customer purchase numbers, it finally clicked. Numbers. What if it wasn’t related to the text at all? Maybe it was similar to the riddles that sent me to those pages and the mystery behind them was related to their page numbers, or the page numbers in general?
Once at home, I went to work right away. I told myself once more that I needed to get the full picture. I noted down all the page numbers in the book, one after another. When I was done, and looked at the result, nothing stood out to me, at least not at first. Then I haphazardly picked one of the secret pages. It was page 427 and was right in front of page 811. Then it continued on.
811, 812, 813, 814, 815, 816, 817, 818, 818, 820, 821, and right after it, was yet another secret page.
This one being page 528. After that, the regular page numbers continued.
822, 823, 824, 825, 826, 827, 828, 829, 830, 831, 832, 833, 834, 835, 836, 837, 838, 839, 840, 841, 842, 843, followed by another one, page 143.
Suddenly I wondered about something. I’d put all those page numbers down because of the secret pages. What if they weren’t placed randomly, like I’d originally thought? Yet when I checked their distribution, and put the number of pages before and after them into sequence, I found no correlation. Then I began adding up the page numbers. First those that appeared before, and then those that appeared after the secret pages. The results made me frown. Half of them were too big and exceeded the total number of book pages by far.
Then, staring at the pages from 111 to 137, which I’d just added together, I got another idea. What if I only added together their last digits? The result I came up with was six-hundred-and-forty-eight. Which was exactly the secret page that followed afterward! My eyes grew wide. I had it, hadn’t I? The hint I’d been looking for! I was going livid.
Right away, I went to the next one, and calculated the preceding numbers, only to come up with an entirely different result than the page number of the secret page that followed them. Cursing, I got up. It had been nothing but a stupid coincidence. I laughed, but this time in abject misery, mocking my stupidity.
How’d it be so damn easy, you idiot? There was no way. None of this was easy. None of it!
Yet as I stared at the result, I’d just come up with, I noticed something. The result of my calculation was seven-hundred-and-two. The page number was three-hundred-and-fifty-one. Wait. Wait. Wait. That’s half of seven-hundred-and-two! Maybe it really was nothing but a coincidence, and maybe I was grasping at straws, but what else was I to do?
The next result I came up with was one-hundred-and-seventy-six. If I multiplied it by three, it gave me the page number of the secret page that followed it: 528. The number seven-hundred-and-fifteen, divided by five, gave me the page number of secret page 143.
With newfound energy, I continued adding, dividing, and multiplying. Once I was done, I saw that it all checked out. All the page numbers of the secret pages resulted from calculations using the last two digits of their preceding pages.
What did it mean, though? Did it mean anything? The exhilaration I’d been under ebbed away, and I sat there, staring at all my calculations, wondering if there was any meaning to it. Yet there had to be. This couldn’t have been designed as another red herring. This was too damn complex. No, there had to be a reason for this.
What if there was an order? If I went through all my calculations, I noticed that a sum was never divided by the same number. The highest number that a result was divided by was twenty-six. The highest a sum was multiplied by was twenty-seven. It was fifty-three distinctly different calculations.
With that, I started ordering them one by one, staring backward from the highest division up to the highest multiplication. Then I put the topic of each page behind the numbers on the resulting list. I’d hoped for something. I’d hoped to find it starting with the page about the origin of the universe, followed by constellations and stars up to the evolution of apes, plants and other animals.
Yet it was all mixed-up, complete and utter nonsense. There was no order to it at all! Even when I ordered them in other ways, trying to find some sort of connection. It was the same. Nothing but nonsense.
My hands were shaking with anger. I crumbled up the stupid ordered lists and threw them across the room. Then I cursed in sheer and utter rage. This was freaking stupid! This was insane! All of it was nothing but pure fucking nonsense! I picked up a random object on my table and hurled it against the wall, where it shattered into pieces. Then I threw aside a chair that stood in my way and even kicked over the small couch table.
I only stopped when one of my neighbors banged against the wall, screaming at me to knock it off, and threatening to call the cops. Instantly, the anger went away, and I stared in shock at my demolished living room. What he the hell was happening to me? Why’d I started destroying my things at one in the freaking morning?
Then I smoothed out the lists and put them on one of the few remaining free spots on my living room wall. Who knows, I might need them after all.
I laughed as I looked from them to the rest of the wall. It was entirely covered by now. Even worse, stacks upon stacks of notes had accumulated in front of them. I was proud, but I also knew that this thing was absolutely insane. Once more, I couldn’t help but wonder what I was doing.
Shaking my head, I turned around and went to bed. While my fingers rested on the light switch, I turned around one last time. I stared at the mad lines, at all the paths who were connecting and interconnecting here and there. Nothing but lines upon lines. Here and there, if I stared at them for long enough, I could almost make out shapes.
I froze. What if it was a visual puzzle? What if there was a hint hidden in the shapes of the paths? I spent days drawing points and lines and connections, warping them into surreal shapes. This was stupid, wasn’t it? How’d it be visual? There was probably not a damn thing to be got from this. Yet I couldn’t stop. Each day, I spent the afternoon, the evening, and half the night drawing. Eventually, it all came to nothing. There was nothing but mad lines, and not a clear shape in sight.
I didn’t give up though. Hell, I wasn’t even discouraged. I was beyond that, far beyond that. What if there was something else? Maybe a hidden code corresponding to the page numbers?
By now I’d completely forgotten about my former vow to not think about the book at work. Instead, I read up on cryptography. I went through article after article. I learned about the Caesar Code and Binary Code, the Polybius Cipher and the Hex Code. Before long, I spent more time reading up on things than doing any actual work. Eventually, I even brought pages filled with numbers with me, cross-checking them for hints of any and all codes.
I heard coworkers whispering behind my back. They’d seen the weird articles I was studying, heard me mumble to myself, and even noticed the endless lists of numbers I brought with me each day.
Eventually, my superior came up to me. When he asked me what I was doing with all those weird pages, I told him it was nothing but a little puzzle, a way to keep my brain active.
“Well, Todd,” he started in a condescending voice. “You’re not here to do any of those ‘little puzzles.’ You’re here to do your damn job. Where are the calculations for this month? I’ve been waiting for them all day!”
“Oh, I guess I’m almost done with them. I just need another hour or-“
My voice trailed off when he picked up one of the page. Suddenly, when I saw him holding it, I grew nervous, restless even.
“What even is this? It’s just random numbers.”
He saw my face, saw the way my eyes grew wide when he’d picked it up. The hint of a smile washed over his face as he crumbled it up. He opened his mouth for another remark, but before he could, I jumped off my chair and ripped the page from his hand. He cringed back in shock.
“The hell’s wrong with you!?” he screamed at me.
Instead of saying anything, I smoothed out the paper and made sure he hadn’t torn it apart. Only after a few seconds did I realize what I’d just done. By now, half the office had gotten up to watch the weird exchange. Suddenly, I felt very watched and almost sunk back into my chair.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to…” I started mumbling, but soon broke under the pressure of all those eyes.
“Get back to work and finish those damned calculations! If I see you tinkering with any of this shit again, you can clean out your desk!”
With that, he stormed off. I heard people all around me. Some were snickering, others were speaking in more reserved, even worried tones. Yep, I thought. It’s official. I’m the office nutjob.
Right away, I closed all the Wikipedia articles I still had open, and put away all my notes. And then, grudgingly, annoyed, and half-mad at the distraction it represented, I went back to work. Somehow, though, it felt meaningless. None of these stupid calculations and customer orders mattered. What the hell was I even doing? What if it really was a code, or, hell, a double code? My mind went wild with ideas. Five minutes later, the notes were back in my hand. I couldn’t even remember taking them out again.
Cursing, I pushed them back into my backpack, and more than a little frustrated, forced myself to work on calculations until the day was finally over. The moment my shift ended, I jumped off my chair and rushed for the door. People stared at me, their faces a mixture of amusement and worry. I didn’t care. I had work to do. The important kind of work!
I’d just tried to find another connection between the page numbers and the secret pages when my doorbell rang. I ignored it, but it just kept on ringing. When it finally stopped, I sighed with relief. Just leave me alone, I cursed. I’ve got work to do! Then, mere moments later, my phone vibrated on the other end of the room. Dammit, I’d forgotten to put it on mute. I waited for it to stop, but it didn’t. It kept ringing and ringing. Cursing, I went over to see who it was.
It was my friend Andrew. More than a little annoyed, I answered it.
“Yo, Todd, you home?” I heard his voice from the phone, but also more distant and muffled, from behind the front door.
My first reaction was anger. Then I pushed it away. What the hell was wrong with me? This was Andrew. He was my best friend. The only one from our old group who still lived in the same city. Right away, I thought about how long it had been since I’d last seen him. Surprised, I realized it must’ve been weeks, maybe months. One glance at the mess in my living room told me why.
“Yeah, sure, hold on,” I said over the phone, and made my way to the front door.
Andrew smile at me, and held up two six-packs.
“Haven’t seen you in forever! How about we have a few? I got quite the story for you, man!”
“Sure, come on in!”
Andrew had barely set foot in the living room when he stopped. His eyes grew wide as he stared at the wall and the stacks of paper.
“Holy shit, man. I was wondering why I haven’t heard from you. The hell is all that? You working on some sort of project?”
“Kind of,” I mumbled, more than a little embarrassed.
I picked up the papers on the couch and put them aside to make room for him.
“Sorry about the mess.”
“Nah, man, it’s all right. So, the thing I was about to tell you… You remember, Thomas, right?”
Thomas, I thought. Did I know a Thomas? Then I remembered him. Of course, I did. He’d been part of our group back in the day. I rubbed my temples for a second, wondering what the hell was wrong with me, before I nodded.
“He’s getting married, and you won’t believe who the lucky girl is!”
With that, Andrew told me that our friend Tomas had been dating Susan, Andrew’s cousin, for the past three months, and the two of them were going to get married. I listened, nodded here and there, even laughed a few times absentmindedly, but my eyes wandered to my notes again and again.
For a moment, I space out, thinking about an idea that had popped into my mind just before he’d arrived. I must’ve set there for almost an entire minute, holding my beer and staring off at nothing until Andrew waved his hand in front of my face.
“Yo, dude, you listening?”
“What? Oh, sorry, no. I spaced out for a second.”
“All right, man, I gotta ask. What is all this? What sort of crazy thing are you working on here? Haven’t seen you this into something in years.”
I sighed before I pointed at the book.
“It’s one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books,” I started.
With that, the floodgates broke open, and I told him all about it. He listened, at first curious, but after a while, his expression changed. There was visible concern as I rambled on about secret pages, strange objects, and cryptography.
“Todd, hold on, hold on. What the hell are you even talking about?”
I stared at him.
“The book. You know, those secret pages must’ve some sort of meaning. At first, I thought there was an order to them, but they are too chaotic. If you add up all their page numbers, you get 20670, and if you divide this by-“
“All right, man, stop,” he cut me off. “So you’re adding up all those numbers, I get that, but for what?”
I began explaining again. I tried, but he couldn’t follow me.
“Yeah, I don’t get it.”
“All right, look,” I said, and walked over to the wall covered in lines and numbers.
I told him about the different adventure paths, the references, the secret pages, and when and how they appeared. His face was blank as I rambled on and on.
“Dude, you might want to take a break. This sounds, well, crazy.”
For a moment, I was quiet, then a short, nervous laugh escaped my mouth.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
He stepped up next to me, staring at the wall.
“Shit man, you did all this? Just for a damned book?”
Before I could answer, he reached out and was about to take a page off the wall. My hand shot forward instinctively, batting his aside.
“Don’t touch it!” I called out before I realized what I’d done.
Andrew stumbled back, shocked. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to-“
And then it happened. He bumped right into the stacks of neatly sorted notes I’d placed in front of the wall. They toppled over one another, the pages scattering over the floor and intermixing. My eyes grew wide. Oh god, no. Anger rose inside of me. It had taken me so goddamn long to sort them all out, to order them. There was a freaking method to it, and now he’d destroyed it. He’d destroyed the work of entire freaking days!
“What the fuck are you doing?” I screamed at him.
He cringed back, only now realizing what had happened. He bent down, picking up random pages and putting them on top of one another. When I saw it, I ripped them from his hand and pushed him back.
“No, don’t fucking touch them! Those two don’t belong together, you idiot! Are you freaking insane!?”
With an empty face, he watched as I gathered up some pages, scanned them, and began sorting them as best as I could.
“You know, Todd, that’s what I should ask you.”
“What the hell do you mean?” I snapped at him. “You destroyed the work of days! Days! This is-“
“This is what, man?” he cut me off once more. “It’s nonsense. It’s a freaking children’s book, nothing more.”
That did the trick. I got up and stepped up right in front of him.
“Nonsense? You’ve got no fucking idea how far I’ve come! You’ve got no clue what I’ve done already! And here you are telling me it’s nonsense?”
His face grew hard. For a second, he was about to say something, but then he just shook his head and let out a bitter laugh.
“Jesus man, you’ve lost it.”
With that, he grabbed his things and went on his way to the front door. He turned back once, glancing at me.
“This isn’t normal.”
I heard him, but didn’t react, too busy reorganizing my scattered notes. The notes he had scattered. At the front door, he muttered about how he was worried about me, how I ‘needed to stop’ or ‘should get help.’ I only listened with half an ear. If he said anything else before he slammed the door, I didn’t hear it.
Hours later, when I was done sorting them all out, I realized what I’d done, and how I’d acted. For the first time, I grew truly scared. That hadn’t been normal. That wasn’t me. Why’d I gone crazy like this?
I took first one step back from the wall, then another before I went to pick up my phone. When I tried to call Andrew, he didn’t pick up. Then I saw how late it was, long past three in the morning. I wrote him a quick message, apologizing for my behavior, and told him he was right. I should take a break from the damned book.
That’s what I did right away. I picked up my laptop, made my way to the bedroom, and this time, I turned off the light without looking over my shoulder. I lay down and started browsing YouTube, telling myself to just enjoy a few videos. Yet, even as I watched video after video, the little voice in the back of my head spoke up again. It told me I should go on, told me to get back to the living room.
You almost had it, Todd, you almost had it. Just one more hint and you’re done. Then you can let it go and you can-
“Shut up, goddammit!” I screamed at myself to quiet the subconscious voice. “I freaking know,” I said quieter. “God, I freaking know.”
I sat in bed, the video that was playing already forgotten. As video after video played on, I was on my phone, checking stars and numbers before I eventually drifted off to sleep.
The next morning, I didn’t even prepare myself some morning coffee. I was mad, pissed off, and finally wanted to make some progress. For a while, I tinkered with the various codes I’d read about. What if there was a code, but what if it concerned the entire book and not just the secret pages? What if it was related to the adventure, after all? Maybe you could scramble up all the page numbers and-
I stopped and rubbed my temples. Calm down, don’t go crazy. Calm down and take a step back. You don’t even know if there are any damn codes hidden in the book. You did well deciphering all the different adventure paths, the connections between them, and discovering all the secret pages. But maybe there’s something else you haven’t discovered yet?
That was the question that told me what I had to do. Something I hadn’t dared to do so far. I had to go through the entire book, page by page and chapter by chapter. So far, I’d only made my way through it following the overall adventure. What if there were chapters, or even entire pages, I hadn’t discovered yet? With newfound energy and a new plan, I started right away.
My phone rang shortly after noon, but this time, I didn’t even bother with it.
I didn’t bother noting down chapters, choices, and connections. Instead, I took note of every single object I came upon. I wrote down its page number, the corresponding adventure path, and any reference made about it.
It was a momentous task. Yet after an entire day, I’d barely made it through the first one-hundred-and-thirty pages. The next day, Sunday, I didn’t even manage one-hundred. The further I came, the more objects I noticed, the more combinations and references. I constantly had to go back, to cross-check my notes, and change them accordingly. It was the most enduring task I’d ever attempted, not only regarding the book, but in my entire life.
It took me weeks. Time and again, I went to the office supply store, buying stacks upon stacks of notebooks, only to fill them up by the end of the day. At work, I was barely functioning. I typed in numbers and customer names on autopilot. By now, I didn’t even get stares anymore. I was ignored. A shell of a man who stumbled to his cubicle in the morning, and rushed from it in the afternoon.
Day after day, and week after week, I slaved away over the book’s many pages. Until the day I was finally done. I can’t even say how many weeks it had taken me. There were stacks upon stacks of notebooks all over my living room. It had to be hundreds of them. They were full of notes, objects, names, words, references, anything.
I’d just created a table of how often every single object appeared in which adventure path when I noticed a new hint. I stared at it with a giant grin on my face. The Ruby Orb had been the very first object I’d added to the table.
It appeared in all the different adventure paths:
1. Fantasy – thirty-one times
2. Space – three times
3. Stone Age – two times
4. Ocean and Pirates – eleven times
5. Desert Ruins – twenty-nine times
6. Mountains – seventeen times
7. City-State – seven times
8. Ancient Rome – five times
9. Jungle Tribes – thirteen times
10. Small Village – nineteen times
11. Underwater Civilization – twenty-three times
As I wrote down those numbers, I realized how familiar they were. Cross-checking them online, I found out why. They were all prime numbers! Yes, I thought, I’d found something new!
I quickly did the same for another object, the Ebony Stick. It too appeared in all paths. Four times in the fantasy one. Six times in the city-state one, and so on, always increasing by two in each subsequent path, up to twenty-six times in the Stone Age one. When I checked two others, I found similar sequences.
That’s when I knew what I had to do. I had to go through all the objects, all the hundreds of objects in the book, and check how often they appeared. Here it was, another correlation, another part of the puzzle. I was exhilarated, in a state of glee, and unbound excitement. These sequences, maybe they were the keys to figuring out what the secret pages meant, maybe their distribution and page numbers as well. I could feel it. The solution was so damn close.
I slept when necessary, ate when necessary, and slept right there on the living room floor. Work, and the idea that I had to go, never even crossed my mind. My phone was on the other end of the room. I ignored it. It wasn’t important. This right here, that’s what’s important.
I was done by the end of the week. It was long past midnight on Saturday when I’d finally deciphered the sequences for all three-hundred-and-eleven objects in the book. When I was done with my work, I looked at the tables of objects in a state of awe. I spread them out in front of me and marveled at the pages. For a moment, I was about to dive right into them, but realized how exhausted I was.
For the first time since the beginning of the week, I picked up my phone. It was off, must’ve been for days. I connected it to the charger and turned it on. I was bombarded with a plethora of notifications and messages. For almost a minute, the damned thing didn’t stop vibrating. There were a few messages from Andrew, asking how I was doing, and if I’d stopped obsessing over the damned book yet. I laughed and closed the chat again.
I’d also received countless emails. Most of them were from work, and only now did I realize I hadn’t shown up at all. They started normal enough, reminding me to call in sick, became reproachful after a day or two, and finally, angry. They told me this had been the last straw, and to come in Monday to clean out my desk. It was strange how little I cared, how little it mattered in the grander scale of things. I almost laughed again, then threw the phone aside and laid down to catch some sleep.
When I woke up, I went right back to work. I tinkered with the sequences, looked at each one of them, added them up, multiplied and divided them. It was the Crown of Ice that finally made me look up. When I added all its appearances together, I came to a total of one-thousand. This damned thing, I thought, it was by far the most common object in the book.
I went back to my notes. It was said in the Manuscript of the Seven Seas that the Crown of Ice was found in the Crypt of the Dragon. The crypt was located in the desert ruins path. I went back to it, page 1544, and read the part again. There were three choices. One sent me to leave without the crown and back to a desert tribe. Destroying the crown ended in painful death, while the third option was wearing it. All right, wearing the crown opened a secret passage to the location of the Magic Water, and from there, back on my way through the desert.
Dammit, I thought I had something! I was about to go back to the list. Maybe the number thousand was yet another coincidence. Then something made me look up. The crown appeared in the desert ruins a total of fifty-three times. How long was it again? I stepped up to my living room wall. Ignoring various loops and dead ends, the entire path only encompassed a total of seventy-eight chapters before it started back from the beginning.
Chapter fifty-three described what you found if you opened a chest in the Ancient Pyramid. I read the chapter again, carefully. It was titled ‘The Treasure Chest.’ The chest contained a total of two-hundred-and-eighty-nine gold coins. When I went back to the list of objects, I noticed that the gold coin was mentioned a total of two-hundred-and-eighty-nine times. The same was true for the sparkling diamonds. There were a total of thirty-three in the chest, and the object itself came up thirty-three times.
I got hold of an empty sketchpad, and wrote down ‘chest, pyramid and treasure’ in huge letters. Below it, I noted down all the two dozen objects in the chest, and how often they were mentioned. While I did it, I wondered if similar sections existed for every other object in the book. What if every object’s number of appearance was mentioned somewhere? Not just in this chest, but anywhere.
And then, on a whim, I asked myself another question. What if certain objects weren’t? What if there were just a few, or maybe just one, whose number was mentioned nowhere? Maybe those were the important ones? I spent the entirety of Sunday following through with this idea. I calculated, added objects to yet more lists, and followed through paths and loops, studied my notes, and slowly, the number of objects got smaller and smaller.
Eventually, just like I’d hoped, there was a single object left whose total number of appearances was mentioned nowhere. It was a small, red die. It was mentioned here and there, but only ever in passing, when people played with it in bars on in a street.
There had to be something to this damned thing! I knew it! After this entire week, after all those months I’d spent on this damned book, I’d finally narrowed it down to a single object. A shiver went down my spine when I realized this might be it. This might be the solution I’d been searching for all this time.
I went back to my notes about the red die and its appearances. Here a few were playing with it, there someone was holding it in their hand, and here it rolled over the floor after a fight broke out. Finally, I found what I’d been looking for. There was only a single instance in the entire book where you could interact with it. In a bar in space, you could join a futuristic game of dice. When the game was done, you could pocket the red die.
The short chapter that followed was mundane and almost unimportant. But when I read it, I noticed something. It wasn’t the text, but the choices below. Weren’t they the same as in the chapter before? I went back to the preceding chapter and reread it. Yes, the same two choices, sending you to the same two pages. Almost as if picking the die didn’t matter at all, and making it appear is nothing but a red herring.
And when I saw it, I grinned wider than ever before. There had to be a hint here. No, there had to be a way to finish this entire damned book!
I wrote down the entire chapter and went back to work, studying it. I checked everything about it: the page number, the chapter title, colors, words, anything I could think of. Until late in the morning hours, I pondered over this short, single chapter. I could barely keep my eyes open when I stumbled upon it. It was silly, but I was instantly wide awake again.
The number of words in each sentence was eight. The number of sentences was eight as well. Eight sentences, with eight words each. This was no coincidence. This was it. The total number of words was sixty-four, the square number of eight. It was much too deliberate to be yet another coincidence.
I rushed back to the book, almost stumbling over my feet, and opened page 64. Like a crazed, starved animal, I poured over the words on the page, almost pressing my face against it. The solution, it had to be right here! Yet when I was done reading, I was dumbfounded. The entire page comprised a single chapter, a chapter I knew damn well. I also knew the page number 64 damn well.
It was the beginning of the fantasy path. I read once again that I was a young farmer, standing in front of a burned down farm, the bodies of my dead parents lying next to me and about to set out on a grand adventure. For the next three hours, I analyzed every single word in the chapter, every single one, and I found as many hints as I could search for. I went back to the chapter about the die, and slowly came to another conclusion, and then another.
The number of certain letters corresponded with the number of certain items in the space path. If you put certain letters from certain words together, you ended up with another number. I followed every single one of them, but each one ended at another mundane page in the book. I slaved away over those as well, analyzed them and found more hints, more connections, more clues. And the longer and the more I analyzed them, the more I could find, if I wanted so. There were an endless number of nonsensical clues and hints. They were all leading me on, leading me around in circles. On and on and on.
I sat there, staring at the damned book, and at thousands of pages of notes. I sat in front of an entire wall, covered in mad lines and scribbles. And then I laughed. For long, terrible minutes, I couldn’t stop laughing. This was all crazy. This was all entirely and utterly crazy.
And finally, it clicked. At this singular moment, it finally and ultimately clicked. There was no solution. The book had no solution. It finally made sense.
I’d slaved away for weeks, months, and all I’d done was to walk in circles, continuing from one hint to another, only to be sent back to the beginning. The entire damned book was a loop, a loop of loops with secret loops that sent you to more secret loops.
For the first time in months, I closed the book and put it away. After that, I slowly took down all the mad pages on my wall, stacked up all the notes, and put them in away in a box in a state of apathy.
I was done.
All of this had been utterly meaningless, a fundamental waste of time.
That night, I didn’t sleep. I lay in bed, contemplating a lot of things. My life, my work, the book, and why I’d been so taken by it. Yet just as with the book, there was no solution. There was nothing to it all.
The next day, with the book in my backpack, I made my way back to the store. It felt as if the entire world, an endless number of possibilities, was resting on my back. I knew I had to return it. I had to get rid of it before it threw me into yet another crazy fit.
When I entered the store, the old man looked up.
“Can I help you with-?”
His voice trailed off when he recognized me, and a surprised look came over his face.
“Well hello there, young man. Haven’t seen you in quite a while.”
I only nodded, took down my backpack, heaved out the book, and brought it to rest in front of him.
“I’d like to return this.”
The old man probed me for a moment.
“We’ve got a no-money-back policy,” he said, pointing at a small, almost illegible sign behind himself.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I just want to get rid of it. I’m done.”
“So, you got your reward, then?”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that.
“Guess so.”
“What was it?” the old man asked, curiously.
“It’s meaningless. There’s no end to it. I just goes on forever.”
“Oh,” he mouthed.
“You ever tried it yourself?”
“Did once, when I was younger, but got nowhere. Was way too hard for me.”
“There’s one thing I’ve been wondering about. Who the hell wrote this thing? I mean, it’s freaking insane. How’d you ever write something like this?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, there’s something I didn’t tell you when you first came in. I originally bought the book from a street merchant half a century ago. He told me a few things, and I learned a few more from other people over the years.”
“Like what?”
“It’s nothing but rumors, of course. The merchant told me the book had been written by the devil himself. Someone else told me it was supposedly written by Machiavelli back in the day to confuse a man who’s wronged him and drive him mad. Another person was convinced it was the work of aliens. The most plausible, however, is that there’s no single author, but that it was written over the course of centuries, with each new writer adding to it, making it longer and more complex.”
“Heh, sounds about-“ I started, but the old man raised a hand.
Then he brought his head close to mine, his voice changing to a conspiratorial whisper.
“There’s one more. Someone else told me it was written by no other than God himself as a big, giant joke about our earthly existence itself.”
I laughed, but it was a weak laugh. Nothing but a giant joke. That fit it well, didn’t it?
As I stepped out of the store and stared at the urban bustle around me, I began thinking.
People were hurrying past me on their way to work. Cars and buses rushed up and down the street. As I watched it all, the ever-repeating frenzy of civilization, I realized that all of it was yet another never-ending loop. On and on and on it went, everyone doing the same thing over and over and over again.
And as I walked on, I burst out laughing again. Maybe that was all right, and maybe it didn’t matter. Who knows, maybe the book was true after all.
Maybe all of this; life, existence, just like the damned book, was nothing but God’s big, giant joke.
