Ready Player One

 

My second favorite book in the whole world is Ready Player One, where an eccentric multi-billionaire wills his entire fortune to whomever can solve a series of puzzles buried in a virtual world called the Oasis. (If anyone cares, my favorite book is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.) There are many similarities between the treasure hunt in Ready Player One and the hunt in Byron’s book. Most importantly, the puzzles in  Ready Player One are based on and intended to promote the creator’s passions, including pop music, movies, television, and, of course, video games. It follows that Byron’s puzzles too would be based on and promote his passions. 

As with the solutions to the puzzles in Ready Player One, we too must get inside the head of Byron Preiss, to understand how he thought, how he lived his life, his abilities, and his passions. Every clue must be consistent with his standards, values, experiences, and skills. In essence, the hunt is Byron and Byron is the hunt. 

So often, when a clue seems to have no good solution, I hear treasure hunters complaining about what a terrible puzzle designer Bryon was. This really bothers me because based on what I’ve learned about Byron, professionally, he didn’t make many mistakes. This questioning of Byron’s abilities reminds me of when I was a teacher’s assistant while working toward my masters degree in computer science. I lost track of how many students came to me during my office hours convinced that their code was right and the computer was wrong. It usually took me about two minutes to find the bug in their code. Likewise, I have yet to find a mistake in Byron’s puzzles; it has always turned out to be a failure in my interpretation. If a clue seems in error, it isn’t a mistake, it's another clue. 

Working through these puzzles felt a bit like being in the book Ready Player One, but without all the money, or fame, or cool graphics. However, in the case of Byron’s puzzles, even without all that stuff, what you’re still left with is…everything—absolutely, positively, everything!

With metal walls 

It is important here to highlight the author/editor part of Byron’s resume, suggesting a deep understanding of the English language. In this context, “With metal walls” does not refer to a structure that has metal walls. It takes advantage of a less obvious interpretation of the word with, specifically “in the direction of.” This means that we are to move in the direction of “metal walls,” which is an allusion to the famous war ship Old Ironsides.  

Face the water

Your back to the stairs

Feel at home

Starting at the bottom of the stairs, moving in the direction of Old Ironsides (the USS Constitution), moored across the bay (north northwest), takes us across the middle baseball field to home plate. 

All the letters

Are here to see

The USS Constitution, back in 1982, used to fly naval signal flags (per George Ward). John Palencar, in a recent interview with Mr. Ward, confirmed that symbols approximating these flags appear in the image. If you look at the two symbols closest to the smaller bubble (the two lit by lamplight), they appear to be most similar to the signal flags for “o” and “s”. The “o” signal flag is rotated so as to double as the letter “n” in Boston.

In the Expedition Unknown Boston episode, John Palencar said that the purpose of the bubble near the bird’s beak was the visual pun, “Boston Pops.” This has been decried as a bad clue, too abstract. But I think this is looking at it the wrong way. A bad clue, an imperfection, is a clue itself. Maybe it’s not about the pun at all. Maybe it’s about giving Palencar an excuse for having bubbles in the image. Maybe it’s really all about the bubbles.  

The light source is reflected from the outside and inside of each bubble, producing two dots, one upper right, the other lower left. In the Braille alphabet two dots in this orientation is the letter “i.” 

Reading top-down, symbol, bubble, symbol, gives us “o”, “i”, “s”: Old Ironsides. Now, the puzzle gets even harder. It follows that, if Byron has us standing on home plate looking at the USS Constitution, we should continue in that direction toward the casque. But that would be too easy!

Welcome to Level 6.