The Room

Apparently, I have acquired a reputation for solving puzzles without enough clues for most people. Once or twice a year I would have a pair of gentlemen knock on my door and ask me to go with them. I knew the drill and it was sometimes even the same two guys I had seen before.

One of those times ended up being some warehouse-sized room that based on the sound and length of the trip to get there, was not in North America. It had hundreds of clear cubes filled with rocks, liquids, gases, objects, and pictures. They provided all of my usual supplies and I spent a couple of days taking pictures, making notes, and documenting what was within each cube.

It was obvious once I realized that everything started at the center and spiraled out that this was about the elements. The display with Carbon having coal, oil, tar sands, diamond, and graphene was the real breakthrough. I went back and documented everything and learned a ton about how they thought about the universe. Hydrogen was not the first element. It wasn't even in the first dozen elements in their chart. Based on their way of thinking, What we had assumed were the building blocks of the universe were themselves made up of even smaller forces that have been knocked out of balance. All of the palpable things we took for granted were in reality just combinations of things that eventually nulled themselves out. It could take less time than we could even measure, or it could take multiple times the known age of the universe to change but eventually, everything returned to its ground state. Everything was temporary in one way or another but we could do amazing things in that meantime.

I spent multiple months typing everything up from my observations and then returned to my boring life. I did a bit of research on what companies are working on new developments and made some wise investments based on what I had learned was going to be possible in the near future. It never hurts to put your bonus money to work for your grandchildren. We also haven't scratched the surface of the periodic table of elements based on the hundreds of cubes beyond the last known element on our charts. The objects and pictures for some of those will really help as we try to move to other stars.