Pietros maze

PERPLEX CITY, SEASON ONE The search for the Receda Cube on Earth

Solved Puzzles

The Easy Part

The Salk Family website contained a link to download the program that Pietro Salk had apparently been writing during his brief awake from his coma.

• It turned out to be a maze and initially required a laptop with OSX and inertial sensors to control it.
• On the 25th an update was issued saying they had found a bug and fixed it.
• On the 27th a cross platform version was released with a seperate tilt control .jar file, which seems to have later been updated to a smaller version with less files.

• Maze levels 1-5 were solved fairly quickly, producing messages at the end of each level.
• BriEnigma's maps:
  • Level 1
  • Level 2
  • Level 3
  • Level 4
  • Level 5

1. "I am dreaming now"
2. "All I am is dreaming"
3. "I will wake soon and when I wake I will die"
4. "I know this to be true"
5. "I am not afraid"

The Hard Part

• Maze 6 proved a bit harder to crack, however through a mixture of decompiling and/or finding files in the original controller.jar for the cross platform version of the maze, the following message was found.

In my dreams, I am walking in a maze. I am following someone who is always just a little too far ahead. A moment before I round one corner, she rounds the next. I never see her, not even a glimpse of her cloak. She. It is a woman, then, my quarry. I follow a woman, walking in this maze. The place is quiet. There is no sound but that of my footsteps on the floor. I cannot see the floor, it is too dark. The walls are blank. It is a maze. I made this maze and now I am caught within it. The adherents of ancient religions compare the darkness of this life to the wandering in a maze. Only with the light of eternal truth, they say, will we be set free. But there is no light to follow. Only a woman, whom I know to be ahead of me. I walk a little faster. I know, without knowing how I know, that she also walks a little faster. Only a little. Only just out of reach. I try to remember who she is, this woman always ahead of me. I think that I know. I think that this maze is knowledge, that I have pieced it together, like the construction of a complex puzzle. I used to make puzzles. I do so no longer. She does not tire. She does not hunger. She does not thirst. Her speed is steady, increasing when mine increases, decreasing when mine does. If I stopped, she too would stop. This pursuit could last forever. It must not last forever. I have no time left. Moments only. Moments are all we have, of course. I remember something, a fragment, a conversation. A woman pushing a slip of paper toward me across a table. It is gone again. I walk on. I call out in the darkness: "Who are you?" My voice returns to me. It asks me the same question. I almost know the answer. In fury, I begin to run. I urge my body forward. Ahead of me, her speed increases. I strain. My lungs ache. I am no nearer to her. I run faster, as fast as I possibly can. I will never catch her. I collapse to the floor of the passage. I sit with my back to the wall, breathing hard. I despair. My time is almost up. If only I could turn the timer over, set the sand flowing in the other direction. I consider this. Yes. I think I may know how to proceed. I stand up. I turn around. Yes, this is how it was. I walk away from her. And now she begins to pursue me. I am not afraid. This is how it must be. I have created this maze. I am its author. Through dimly-lit corridors, she pursues me. She travels at the same pace as me. When I slow, she slows. When I quicken, she does likewise. Nothing appears to have changed. But everything has changed. I am the author of this maze. I know its every turn and bend, its every blind alley. I know its heart. Now, she is following me. Now I control our destination. Counting in the half-light, I pass by one entrance, then another, then another. The passages appear identical. I am looking for the heart of the maze. I choose carefully. This place is larger than one might have expected. I lead her along the route I have chosen. She is always just a little behind me, just out of view. We come at last to the place I have chosen. The heart of the maze. I know, I think I know, what will happen here. The centre of the maze is an empty room. This is the secret at the heart of every maze. She knows it too. Emptiness, a space at the heart. The room is long. It is unbending. It is as large as the maze itself. This is a mystery beyond explanation. I walk slowly up the length of the room. Slower than slow. She is behind me. She knows what will happen now. I reach the far distance. This is impossible, of course. I turn around. I see her. She sees me. She speaks a series of words. They mean nothing to me. They mean everything. They are this story. It is time for me to go. "

• It seems we would have revealed this message 4 letters at a time at the end of each level solved.
• The program would have output the following message when you solved all the mazes:

I understand what I must do. There is a maze. I am to lead others through it. I must. We must find her, we must discover the truth, the heart. I have placed my maze in this maze of words. The words are the maze. They will lead those who must come after me. It is time for me to go"

The Interesting Parts

The Logs

• Michiko Clark made a comment on her radio interview
• She reported Salk's death, mentioning old files hidden in the maze.
• This led Brian Enigma to try some of the sentences from the message on the Salk Family website.
• Every sentence of the message, from the one in Maze 1 to the 'time for me to go' leads to a URL containing various pieces of the Salk logs.
• The complete conversation can be read in Salklogs.doc

The Shape

• Simon gave us co ordinates for a closed off shape in some of the later mazes.
• This may have something to do with Pietro talking about the room at the heart of the maze.
• SteveC mapped the entire empty space in every map, and came up with this shape.
• Brian Enigma did a similar task, and got the same shape in plain text.

Codenames "V", "Q", "K" and "C", were hired to do the Theft. They are tied to the deaths of Fran Mendling, Bernardo Holyoke, Pietro Salk, Monica Grand, Isaac Cymbalisty, Anna Heath --- but someone else got to The Cube first. Who? And Why? "We never held it, It was already gone."