You find yourself in a small box of a room. There’s a Jackson Pollock poster on the wall in front of you. The small desk you're sitting at holds only a laptop computer, a coffee mug, and half a bowl of Ramen noodles. "The dorm," you say.
"Yes," comes Inez's voice from one side. You turn to see her stretched out luxuriously on your narrow bed. She looks older now, somewhere in her late teens. “This was one of the rare nights I didn’t sleep over. I think I had a term paper due the next day.”
“I don’t remember any of that,” you tell her.
Inez’s fingers brush up against the key hanging around her neck. “I do.”
You can't think of anything to say to that, so you just nod back at her silently. Suddenly, you feel exhausted.
A crease appears between Inez's eyebrows. She slides off the bed and walks over to you, coming behind you. "Close your eyes," she says.
"What --?"
"Close your eyes," she repeats, just as gently. So you do.
You feel her slender hands settle on your shoulders, and her fingers begin pressing slow circles into your muscles. Even though this woman is all but a complete stranger to you, there's something oddly familiar about it all. "Nice," you murmur.
"Whenever you got tied up in knots, my neck rubs could always get you to loosen up again."
"That was your version of me," you remind her. "No one in my history ever gave me neck rubs like this."
Her hands freeze, and her face appears, peering around at you from behind. "No one?"
You shake your head.
"Well, that's a shame," she says. With a nod, she stands up straight again and continues the massage.
"With just a two-letter alphabet," she says, as if there weren’t a cryptogram, a neck massage, and at least half a dozen years between here and your conversation back at the cathedral, "you can generate all sorts of patterns. In a maze, your two-letter alphabet – 'stop' and 'go' – shows you a clear pathway through the chaos. With the nonogram, it creates works of art."
Her hands stop now, pulling a small groan of disappointment out of you. She sits down on the edge of the bed. Her eyes have that unfocused sheen to them again.
"The more letters your alphabet has," she says, "the more complex the patterns get. By the time you get to the full twenty-six, you can generate patterns that communicate the full sum of human knowledge."
"Language is a kind of puzzle," you say.
She nods vigorously. "And puzzles are a kind of language." She flashes that wicked grin again and leans towards you, adding in a whisper, "But why does it have to stop there?"
"Stop where?"
"What kinds of patterns could you generate with a hundred-letter alphabet? A thousand?"
You open your mouth and then close it again, starting to see what she's getting at.
"Let me show you something." She stands, digging through the pocket of her jeans, but suddenly stops. Her eyes lock with yours. "Promise you won't get mad? It's another puzzle."
That gets a chuckle out of you, in spite of yourself.
Grinning, her eyes sparkling, she pulls another one of her envelopes out of her pocket. Instead of handing it to you, she opens it herself. Then she walks to your desk and smooths the paper down flat. Holding her hand over the bottom of the page, she turns, smiles, and, with a tilt of her head, gestures for you to come over.
You stand, coming up beside her. You've never been this close to her before, and you can smell her: not perfume – just soap and skin and the heat of her body.
Her hand still covers something on the bottom half of the page, but the top half of the page contains letters arranged in a grid:
“What do you see?" she asks you.
"Random letters."
"Are you sure? Look more closely."
You do, and things start jumping out at you. "Well, there are three E's in a row at the top. That's kind of odd. There's the word "does" along the left-hand margin. "Dais" across the bottom."
“See what I mean?” Inez says. “You told me that what I presented you with was nothing more than just a random bunch of letters. Even so, your brain automatically started to identify patterns in it."
“That’s just the way our brains work,” you tell her. “We do it automatically. Like noticing that a cloud looks like an elephant or seeing Jesus’ face in a tortilla.”
"Exactly!" Inez shouts out suddenly, startling you. She twists to face you, leaning onto the hand anchoring down the sheet of paper. “Our brains are basically pattern-seeking machines. But tell me: why would the Universe have created us that way? What are we supposed to do with that ability? What is it that the Universe wants us to find?”
“Find where?”
Her free hand gestures in a wide arc. “Everywhere. There are patterns all around us. The Universe is full of patterns. It’s nothing but patterns. You said before that the Universe seems like a chaotic place. But what if it isn't chaos? What if it's just another puzzle – one written in a one-million-letter alphabet?"
"A million –" you begin, but the sentence dies in your throat. "You would never be able to decipher a pattern that complex."
"Which, to our limited brains, would just look like chaos. But that wouldn't mean that the pattern isn't there all the same." She leans forward again, adding conspiratorially: "The source code for reality."
"You can't be serious about all this," you say.
"Come and see." And she's gone again.
"Wait –" you call after her, too late.
With her hand gone, you can see what's written on the bottom half of the page:
Find this puzzle's hidden message on the Solution Page to determine where you go next.
Or you can