Genie Chronicles




Prolog
The Puzzle Box



Jack Phillips sat on the couch, flipped on the TV and surfed the
channels. Finding nothing much on, he settled on a "Seinfeld" rerun,
then out of habit reached for the puzzle box. He had pretty much given
up on ever solving the damn thing, and now just fiddled with it to
relieve stress or boredom.

The box had come from his aunt, or more accurately his late aunt. She
had been a loveable but peculiar old bird, never marrying, spending all
of her spare time and income traveling wherever her fancy took her.
Over the years she had filled every corner of her little bungalow with
an incredible collection of what he always though of, fondly, as junk.
It was mostly trinkets and exotic objects that caught her eye during her
travels. She had never written much of a will, so after her death the
family gathered and sifted through her collection, each taking anything
that interested them or that held special meaning, and giving away the
rest to charity or the land fill, whichever was appropriate.

Jack was still surprised that this particular family meeting had
happened with no bloodshed, much less any major arguments, over who got
what. Ultimately he had come away with only a few items.  Most of them
were simple things that held some personal sentiment connected with his
aunt.

The box, though, was an exception. It was about six inches wide by two
inches tall by three inches deep.  It was covered by an incredibly
detailed inlay of different types and shades of wood.  He had picked it
based solely on its beauty, and hadn't noticed until he got it home that
the lid was locked. In searching for a latch or keyhole he discovered
that the inlay pieces moved. They seemed to actually be some sort of
puzzle, kind of like the tile puzzles he had as a kid where you shifted
around the tiles to order them in a number sequence or to form a
picture. This puzzle was much more complicated, though. Each piece was
about half an inch square, making for 48 pieces to arrange on the lid.

That might not have been so bad, but it wasn't long before he discovered
that the pieces could be shifted from one side of the box to another and
over the seam between the lid and the body of the box.  He had yet to
figure out how that worked, but basically it left him with a 6-sided
puzzle of some 287 pieces that could only be shifted one at a time, and
no idea of what the finished puzzle should look like.  So, after a
couple of weeks playing with the box his wonder at its workings and
hopes of solving its puzzle and actually opening it had mostly faded.

Jack shifted the pieces randomly as he tried to get into the Seinfeld
rerun, but it just wasn't holding his interest.  He finally clicked off
the TV and sat staring at the box, his thoughts meandering.  He felt a
vague tinge of guilt that he wasn't working, as he had a deadline
rapidly approaching for a project that wasn't quite done.

Jack was a free-lance web and graphic designer, and worked out of his
studio apartment.  He usually had no problem separating his work and
personal time, but this particular day he just couldn't get going.  It
was now early evening, and the whole day looked pretty much like a write
off.  He stared at the box awhile longer, bringing it in and out of
focus as he tried to get some idea of what the completed puzzle should
look like, if indeed it even was a puzzle.

He was about to put the box down and peruse his DVD collection for a
movie to watch when a light bulb went off almost painfully in his head.
He rushed over and woke up his graphic workstation, then placed the box
on his flatbed scanner.  He scanned all six sides of the box, and then
started the painstaking work of tracing each inlay piece.  Two hours and
three pb&j's later, he had each inlay piece displayed separately on his
monitor, and could move each around as kind of a virtual jig saw puzzle.
Satisfied with his evening's progress, and tired of staring at pictures
of little pieces of wood, he saved his work, watched a movie and went to
bed.

The next morning, knowing that if he started playing with his virtual
puzzle he would get nothing else done, he tore into the project he had
put off completing the day before.  He put the finishing touches on it
in record time and by early afternoon he was ready to start again on the
puzzle.  He had no other projects scheduled for more than a week, so his
goal was to solve the stupid thing before then.  The rest of that day
and all the next he worked like a man possessed, ignoring calls from
friends and all but the most persistent urges to eat, sleep or use the
john.

He tried combination after combination of pieces until his vision
blurred, but eventually an image began to form in the middle of his
screen.  The top of the box was solved first, as it was the easiest.  It
resolved into a beautiful and stunningly detailed image of a woman's
face.  The sides and bottom were harder as they were mostly geometric
patterns. By the evening of the second full day, however, he had it
solved, at least electronically. He saved the files and then decided to
reward himself by going out for dinner and a few beers. He called a
couple of friends he had been ignoring for the previous few days and
asked them to come along.

The following morning he slept late, forced himself to take a jog and
eat a decent breakfast, and then, consulting his images and notes made
over the past several days, began the arduous task of arranging the
inlay pieces in the order he had discovered.  He had never really liked
the tile game as a child, and had never completed one.  After several
false starts he decided to visit a toy store and buy an easier puzzle to
practice on before he felt comfortable attacking the box again.

He sweated over the box all that day and most of the next, unsure of why
he was now so obsessed with solving the puzzle. He couldn't come up with
a good reason, but was driven nonetheless.

Now, late in the evening of the second day of sliding little wooden
pieces around this stupid box, sitting on the couch in just a
comfortable pair of cutoff shorts with a half-drunk beer getting warm on
the coffee table, he came to the final tile.  He was so keyed up by this
point that he could barely hold his hands still enough to move it into
place.  He eventually got a grip on himself, though, and, holding his
breath, slid it home.  He heard a soft click and expelled his breath in
a whoosh.  Now what?

One of the first things he had done when he originally saw the box was
to shake it, of course.  As far as he could tell nothing was in it. At
least that was what he had been assuming. But now, with it apparently
finally unlocked, all sorts of questions surfaced in his brain; "If
nothing is in it, why make it so hard to open?  Did someone open it
before me and remove the contents? What's up with the woman's face?
Maybe it contains some contract or other important piece of paper, a
treasure map, perhaps?" He snorted at that one.  "Wasn't there some
movie I saw part of awhile back about someone opening a puzzle box and
releasing some evil guy with nails in his head?"  He snorted again.

Still, the questions, ridiculous and not, buzzed around his brain as he
tried to make his suddenly sweaty hands open the box.  He had to know,
though, and he finally reached out with one quick motion and popped open
the lid.  Immediately a glowing pink vapor escaped and enveloped his
face.  His last thought before losing consciousness could pretty much be
summed up as: "Well, shit!"