Pandora's Lament

A budding friendship opens more than one door.

When people ask me why I chose science as a vocation, I lie. The lies are believable enough to avoid suspicion: a high school science teacher impressed upon me the importance of physics with captivating experiments, or I became fascinated by an article I read in Scientific American, or I watched the first SpaceX launch. Only Caleb and his father knew the terrifying truth, and they’re not talking. 

Caleb and I grew up attending the same middle school. He transferred in the seventh grade, the result of a divorce that brought him halfway across the country. Nobody liked him. Nobody liked me either, but for different reasons. I had nothing and he had everything. He played his parents against one another, which resulted in a steady stream of expensive toys, gifts born of guilt that kept him forever the pawn, but never a son to love.

He flaunted the excess, at first using it as bait to attract friends, then tossing them back into stagnant waters when boredom prevailed. I felt no sense of obligation to defend them. For years, my quiet disposition, love of books and my aversion to brand name clothes left me a target. Only once had I been invited to a birthday party, at the behest of my anxious mother, who didn’t want her son to grow up alone and dejected.

“I had to invite you. Your mom begged my mom,” the birthday boy said. When I accidentally spilled juice on the carpet, my mother was called to come get me. 

After Caleb burned through the roster of potential playmates, he turned to me, never quite sure how to start a conversation since we shared no similar interests. One day he approached at recess, a looming presence that blocked the sun, casting a shadow over the book I read. When I looked up, he didn’t say anything, assessing if I could be of any use or interest.

“You should come over after school. I got a new gaming PC,” Caleb said.

“I would have to ask my parents,” I said, uncomfortable under his unwavering focus.

“From what I’ve heard, they’ll say yes.”

“I don’t really play video games.”

“I’ll teach you. It will help you make some real friends.”

In a few hours I sat on a stool beside Caleb, who nestled against the back of a red leather gaming chair. I watched him bludgeon emaciated zombies with a baseball bat while he explained the storyline and gameplay. His room carried the trappings of a kid who received everything he asked for, as well as the emptiness and chaos of absentee guardians. Caleb’s dad presented himself once, in a continuous state of distraction, to make introductions. He asked what we wanted to order for dinner and then retreated to his basement lab.

“He works all the time. It’s why they divorced,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said.

“I’m not. Look around you,” Caleb said, decapitating a virtual walking corpse with an ax.

I did, noting the clutter in contrast to the sparsity of items in my own room, except for two bookshelves my dad built that were overflowing. In the corner on a desk, next to discarded candy wrappers, I spotted a Rubik’s Cube. Without thinking, I walked over, picked it up and brought it back to my seat. Caleb cast a sideward glance and rolled his eyes.

“Good luck,” he said.

I knew the algorithms, had read of them, and practiced them in the quiet loneliness of long summer days when I ran out of library books to read. My nimble fingers made swift work of the scrambled cube, and in less than twenty seconds had it solved. Caleb looked at me with a mix of awe and jealousy, captivated by the idea that I could do something he could not.

“Show me,” he said.

For the next several hours, I explained to him the intricacies of the algorithms, to think of the solution as a series of combination locks that unlock a single master lock. We walked through scramble after scramble, and I watched as his frustration grew and he failed to appreciate the design or nuance of the puzzle. In a final burst of anger, he threw the cube against the wall, breaking it into several pieces. 

“It took me several days to solve it, maybe even a week,” I exaggerated. This would be my undoing, a single opportunity at friendship, even as shallow as this, and it had exploded into tiny colored squares.

“What are you doing Saturday night?” Caleb asked.

“Our history project is due. I guess I’ll work on that,” I said.

“Good. An excuse. Tell your parents I need help with mine. You’re going to spend the night.”

“But what about my history project?”

“We both know you already finished it.”

I couldn’t deny it, and even if I did, Caleb would know the truth behind a set of innocent eyes. We agreed on a time, but my mom arrived to pick me up before I could work up the nerve to ask what we would be doing.

When my mom dropped me off, the nervous anticipation had grown to unmanageable proportions. Caleb had said nothing for several days at school, and then on Friday before we went our separate ways, he stopped by my locker to remind me of our plans. After tossing a sleeping bag and pillow into his room, we ate pizza in the kitchen. That’s when he informed me that his dad was not home.

“My parents will be upset if they find out we’re here alone. I could get in big trouble,” I said.

“Relax. He’ll be back in a few hours. Eat quick, though,” Caleb said.

We scarfed down several pieces of deep dish and drank a full 2-liter. I began to clean up my plate and put it into the sink, when Caleb said with a sly grin, “Leave it. I want to show you something.”

He walked down a hallway off the kitchen and to a door with a numeric keypad next to it. Houses don’t have keypads on interior doors unless there’s something depraved or dangerous hidden from prying eyes. I expected Caleb to show me an arsenal of guns and weapons, or a perversion that made my hands sweat.

“My dad’s basement lab. He’ll buy me anything and take me anywhere I want to travel. But the lab. That’s his real baby. The last time he caught me attempting to break the code, he threatened to send me to live with my mother — a serious threat. It took me two months to finally crack it,” Caleb said.

“I don’t understand. He doesn’t want you down there for a reason. I don’t think I want to be a part of this,” I said, as I started to retreat. Caleb grabbed my arm.

“Don’t you get it? You and me, this is… what do you call it, like fate. Me moving here to that dumb school and finding out you like puzzles. Let me show you what’s down there and you’ll see what I mean. Look, man, I need you for this.”

A knot formed in my stomach at the way he emphasized need. I wanted to be released from his iron grip and crawl into a corner, but something about how he said it piqued my curiosity, drawing me into his trust. He sounded genuine, in need of whatever gifts I could provide, a satisfying feeling that overwhelmed any sense of good judgment. The disappointment written across his face ate away at my resolve.

“Okay,” I uttered.

Caleb punched in the code, we walked down into the basement, and he flipped on a master light switch. It powered up the entire lab, filled with workstation computers, monitors and keyboards, with outputs leading to power supplies that spewed out a wide array of thick insulated cords. The cords all led to various inputs at the base of two giant gleaming metal door frames on the rear cinder block wall. The entire setup had been built from scratch and the basement had been dug down deeper with higher ceilings.

That’s when I noticed something different about the central computer’s workstation. Instead of a standard keyboard, a number of three-dimensional pieces with strange markings were scattered all over the surface. The size and shape of every piece differed, each with a series of protruding squares and rectangles.

Caleb removed a journal from a stack of papers, flipped it open to a single page with a handwritten diary entry and drawings and handed it to me.

“Read it,” he said.

I’m a failure. I’ve sacrificed so much, but I have to continue the work I started. The puzzle is elusive. After all these years alienating family, friends and colleagues, my day of redemption should have arrived. Caleb’s path toward destruction, the divorce, all of it must lead to something greater, a healing of sorts, better than it was before. This will change everything… forever. The Enigmicron will bring civilization into a bright new age.

I flipped through several more pages, scientific notations, illustrations and at times the rantings of a mad man. To think Caleb’s father had penned the contents of the journal frightened me, and I handed it back.

“I’ve read all of it,” Caleb said. “I’m going to hand him victory — the both of us, and things will go back to how they were. Better than before, like he wrote. If you can solve it.”

“But… we don’t know what it does,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter!” Caleb shouted.

After a few seconds, he took a deep breath, and said with quiet desperation, “Please. Just try.”

I looked down at the puzzle pieces, finding common symbols and patterns, imagining what the original designer had intended. As I considered the possibilities, a magnetic force pulled me in closer, begged me to pick one up and start solving. So, I did.

Caleb watched as I fumbled, sliding several pieces together, taking them apart, turning them around, then staring in silence for long periods. He smiled when I seemed to get close or have an epiphany. At one point he audibly groaned as I started over again. We both talked out potential angles of attack, directed our energies independently and then together. After a half-hour, we sat down and examined our progress. It appeared chaotic. Unsolvable.

“It’s a jumbled mess. There’s no way this thing can be a cube,” Caleb said.

That’s when I knew it didn’t form a shape, at least not one we would recognize.

“You’re right. It’s not ordered, but it’s somehow natural,” I said.

Caleb didn’t quite get my meaning, but he watched with increasing intensity as I slipped several pieces around and into one another, aligning the symbols, ignoring any assemblance of uniformity. I picked up the last piece and we looked at each other with wide grins. I slid it into place.

All of the symbols lit up glowing green, a surprise that caused me to drop the Enigmicron. It did not break, pulsing between red and green, a signal of some sort to the doorframe on the left. A light above the doorframe pulsed in synchronized rhythm, also between red and green. They both stopped on green and inside the door frame a bright light flashed, which revealed an opening to rolling green meadows surrounded by a lush forest. We could hear birds chirping in the distance.

Caleb grabbed a pen off the desk and rushed over to the entrance. I followed, taking small steps, wary of whatever illusion or portal lay before us. He threw the pen through, and it landed on the other side in the grass. A portal for sure.

“I can’t believe it. Can you believe it? I can’t believe it,” Caleb kept saying repeatedly.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

Caleb answered by crossing over to the other side.

“No!” I screamed.

He turned to face me and smiled, then bent down to pick up the pen, clicking it several times as a demonstration.

“The weather is warm and it’s a bright sunny day on this side of the world. You should join me,” Caleb said.

My legs held firm, weighted down by a fear I could not explain, that whatever we were experiencing, although real, did not fit into the laws of our universe. I wanted to cross over, to prove myself, to share in our discovery, but nothing could propel me forward. Instead, I took a step back, and when I did the light above the door frame turned from green to red. Caleb saw the desperate look on my face. Before he could jump back through the portal flashed bright again and closed.

I don’t know how long I stood there, terrified, wondering what could have happened to him. By the time I heard Caleb’s dad run down the stairs, my body shook with weeping convulsions while I tried to explain the situation. He didn’t shout or cry, a silence that hammered away at my fragile state. When I thought he might provide an explanation or solution for retrieving his son, the light on the other door started pulsating from green to red.

We backed away as he shielded me with an arm, and just as before, the door flashed brightly. It did not open to a majestic scene of natural beauty. On the other side an empty black void filled the space, peering deep into the far reaches of another dimension full of distant constellations. A low frequency humming could be heard and from the darkness a smudge materialized, a blur in the dark matter, approaching closer, reaching out to enter back into our world.

I could sense Caleb’s presence in the thing that appeared before us, humanity wrapped up into a puzzle of organic matter, flesh and bone, torn and twisted, like the Enigmicron. On the surface, I could see a resemblance, pieces of Caleb’s former self — a nose, an ear, more than two pairs of eyes, arms, legs and hands scrunched together to form an aberration of cosmic proportions. It spoke from a small slit I suspected to be his former mouth and lips.

If you could call it speech. The ancient noise, a garbled, unrecognizable sound, masked the faint voice.

“Daddy, please,” Caleb said.

The portal closed.

Caleb’s dad fell to his knees and cried. I couldn’t react of my own volition, waiting out the horror in hopes that he would provide a solution, a greater science that I didn’t understand, which would transform his son back to normal. After several minutes, the man whose only child crossed a threshold into an uncharted universe turned to me with downcast eyes and a weak disposition.

“I’ll take you home. We’ll tell your mother that you felt sick,” he said.

“Is Caleb dead?” I asked.

 He didn’t answer.

On the way home, I was given instructions to remain silent about the ordeal. Who would believe it if I told the truth anyhow. The next week at school I heard a rumor that Caleb’s house burned to the ground. His father’s remains were found among the ashes. A month later I received a package in the mail. It contained the journal and a note from Caleb’s father.

For all of my education and intelligence, I still don’t understand why the Enigmicron works as it does. You are Caleb’s only friend. Maybe you’ll discover the truth lurking behind the veil of this present reality and set him free.

From that day forward, my reading took on a renewed focus and purpose until now. Science and madness are my guide. I'm going to find Caleb and piece him back together, the only puzzle worth solving anymore.