Erno Rubik Challenges The World

Behold! Look at what I, Erno Rubik, have created- A cube! A Rubik's cube! Tremble in fear, mere mortals, for your day of reckoning has come. What I hold in my hand may look like a simple child's toy- something you would give to a toddler to keep them occupied while you chat on the phone- but no! It is far more... Hidden behind this innocuously colored facade is a puzzle who's solution remains just beyond your grasp in perpetuity. The challenge is simple- arrange the panels of the cube such that each side is composed of a single color. But go on and try- I assure you that you will fail, for I, Erno Rubik, have created this cube and therefore only I, Erno Rubik, can tame this beastly puzzle! Cower before my cube, beg for mercy, and perhaps I shall grant it to you. Otherwise, fear my fiendish cube!

This cube is my payback to the world for having ostracized me for so many years. People fear what they do not understand. Therefore I, a man of exceeding intelligence, have been unwillingly made into a recluse due to years of being held at arm's length by the ignorant masses who could not fathom the depths of my brilliance no matter how hard they tried. As a boy, I was mocked and teased because I mastered arithmetic well before the other pupils in my class. The rest of the Hungarian children in my grammar school did not understand how I could grasp concepts such as multiplication tables or prime numbers so easily, and so they shunned me. Girls would not kiss me, for they thought me to be a vampyre who sucked people's brains to heighten my own intellect. By the time I was in college, professors refused to have me in their classes, for I would only complete homework assignments in a base-six numerical alphabet of my own design- and why shouldn't I? It is far more efficient than this clunky and cumbersome 26-lettered alphabet which you peons insist on using. Even today, as a full grown man, I have been forced to stop drawing blueprints for 7-dimensional buildings in order to keep my job as a professor of architecture. Well, I am tired of dumbing myself down for you all. That is why I have invented the cube.

Go on. Hold it in your hand. Do you not find the colors mesmerizing? Of course you do- I selected each hue myself, the wavelengths precisely tuned so as to cause maximum excitation in the visual cortex. Once you see it, you feel compelled to turn it over, to examine all sides of it. You are fascinated by it. Notice the disarray. The blues are not next to the blues! The reds are next to the whites! Yellow and green are scattered about like wildflowers in a cow pasture! What's that orange doing there? You are disgusted by it, yet somehow you cannot look away. A morbid curiosity possesses you. As you turn, slowly you begin to notice something- the cube is not some static representation of chaos. No no- far from, my friend. It turns about several axes, allowing you to move rows and columns of color about. You have control over this cube.

But you are no fool, are you? Aware of how unsurmountable a task it would be to try to align all six colors simultaneously, you decide to break this problem down into chunks. I'll start with the blues, you think. Already, you are defeated! The second you solve one side, you shall have to unsolve it to solve another, and then unsolve that side to solve yet another, and another, and another, and another! Your mind reels from the strain of it all- you have independently solved six colored sides of the cube, yet the cube on the whole remains unsolved to you! Staggering backwards from the force of it all, you assume that you are close to a complete solution, but you could not be further from the truth. Do you know why? You must solve each side simultaneously! But you can't! You must do so, but it is impossible to do so! What a condundrum! What a paradox! Not since Alexander the Great was presented with the Gordian knot has humanity been confronted by such an intractable problem!

...Or so it would seem. If Erno can do it, you think, why cant' I? Surely I am as clever as that Hungarian geek. Maybe you are- but there's only one way to find out. Pour yourself into my cube. Let the puzzle I have created capture your mind. For every second of my life that I have spent alone, pining for companionship, the rest of humankind shall spend an hour alone with my cube, consumed by it. Conversation will cease, as would-be socialites devote themselves to solving my fiendish puzzle, and the globe shall fall silent save for the gentle click-clacking of a billion cubes being rearranged in vain. You shall all be forced to become recluses as have I! I shall teach you to shun me! I shall have my revenge for each wedgie and wet willie I received as a child! Instead of being snubbed, I shall be revered as a god for I have created something that the mind of man can never hope to understand- the Rubik's cube!