I like the idea of puzzles and secret messages. Codes hidden in plain sight, cryptic maps to treasure guarded by ingenious traps, mansions with hidden doors and all sorts of things of that mysterious nature I find super sexy. I am also drawn to certain biblical writing and certainly all of the alchemist works written during times of great persecution that heavily obfuscated their verse in symbolism and code so that those outside the fold couldn’t easily comprehend the authors true meaning. Magic and mystery go hand in hand; if dreaming prophets or cloaked alchemists had written their messages in plain English, their writing would not still fascinate us today to the same extent or for the same reasons. An old chemistry book is probably only slightly more interesting than a modern one but wrap it in symbols, cryptic diagrams and spiritual allegory and suddenly that dry subject is “transmuted” into something worthy of a spooky soundtrack. It’s human nature to want there to be more than there is, for secrets to be just out of reach, for there to be tomes of wisdom hidden for millennia waiting to be rediscovered. This is certainly my favorite plot hook at least! I have at times related heavily with Faust along a similar line of reasoning.
That said, I often find myself day dreaming about bizarre ways of hiding secret messages. In fact I attempt to encode special meaning into all the dimensions of the things I construct and am always looking at the world trying to see secret patterns. Personally, I blame my mother for always giving me those “hidden pictures” activity books! One idea I frequently have along these lines is to pen a book written with hidden messages woven into the text. Imagine a book, readable cover to cover with a complete and quality storyline. Imagine being able to take that same book and read something woven into it such as every fourth word cover to cover and getting an entirely separate story. Perhaps you could even read it a third time, backwards on every 7th word.
At one time I had considered the “braiding” of text into a book. I would treat each nth word as part of a “strand” to braid in the way you would braid string. This proved near impossible to make anything intelligible from a literary perspective though. I am sure it could be done but it would be an enormous amount of trouble. I wrote a little software app to help, but while interesting, I didn’t see a whole lot of promise in this direction.
Many years after all this I considered another way of approaching the core concept that incorporates a physical aspect. I envision a decorative box on a coffee table where upon each side is written a word, phrase or chapter. The reader can pick up the box and select a side at random, read it and then be able to rotate the box 90 degrees in the direction of their choice and continue reading. The “story” would be complete once the reader had read all 6 sides (only 5 sides if they first went “in a ring”), never reading a side more than once and, as I said, only rotating 90 degrees at a time. The story would have to be masterfully crafted to make sense in all its possible variations. In practice I have found that poetry seems well suited for this due to its grammatical tolerance and ambiguity but perhaps there are some clever authors that have a gift for this sort of writing that I don’t. I wrote a bit of software to help generate all the permutations for a story written across a cube and identified 288 unique paths. Below is a snippet to better illustrate what I mean along with a little worksheet I was using to help visualize the face to face transitions:
At some point I thought that it would be a neat idea to not just to have a “story” box such as this, but for there to be a correct order that would reveal something hidden. I took this even further by tying the correct order to a mechanical function in the box whereupon reading the story properly the box would actually open! I considered how I would build a mechanical box like this for a while and ended up with a solution that I think is incredibly simple and elegant. The cipher is actually encoded using a single block of wood with no moving part aside from a marble or ball bearing.
I produced a prototype of this cube core that would be suspended within the puzzle box. I started with a cube of wood and bored a total of twelve holes in it. Each face with four holes, one near each corner, that connect to the opposite face. These holes are therefore aligned to the X, Y and Z axis and intersect at six points within the cube. Starting with the first correct box side, as represented by a cube face, a hole is plugged on the opposite face such that a ball can be placed on the correct face and NOT fall out the other side but instead be trapped at one of the six internal nodes. When the cube is rotated, the ball falls to another node that is again blocked in the particular direction of travel if the face that is now up is correct. By the final correct rotation, the ball exits the last point that could not have been reached in any other fashion but by having entered the correct face and having been rotated correctly six times. This exit hole triggers the box release, any other “fall out” returns the ball to the reader.
Here a link to a video of it in action (remember, it is just a prototype):
Ultimately I imagine a finely decorated box with a hole on each face. The ball can be placed within a starting side of the readers choosing and the story read. If the wrong path is taken, the ball falls out the other side. Within the box I would have a number of catches such that the ball would not fall out immediately on a bad turn but continue to shift around several times to prevent the user from knowing where their mistaken turn was taken.
Unfortunately designing a release mechanism has not been as simple as I had hoped. I do have a very neat idea where all four sides of the box come undone and pull out of the cube core when the ball releases a central pin that secures the faces but this is a tricky build with several rotating mechanisms and latches. I am still holding out for something simpler. Of course it needs to be purely a mechanical solution because batteries would be long dead by the time archaeologists are puzzling over this thing in my tomb in search of my hidden treasure!
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