The Memory Cube

Apokalypsium III

• Project Thunderbolt & the Lunar Language (Apokalypsium I)

• ANNOUNCEMENT | TИƎMƎƆИUOИИA (Apokalypsium II)

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The Fountain Room

December 1st, 2025

☽

I sit now in a darkening room in the waning light of the oil lamp I burned through to reach this place. The last of all I have, dying with me in these catacombs beneath the world.

I sit with my pencil spending the end of my light on the writing of these words beside a fountain that I don’t know how to find.

The music of the waters that gleam like starbeams murmurs through these halls of ancient stones that only God has seen.

I don’t know what will happen to me when the light goes out — nor even when it will. I know only that the last drops of oil remain, but when exactly they will run out I cannot judge. Maybe they will last days, maybe only minutes. I do not know how anything works here. I do not know where ‘here’ is, nor what words like ‘where’ and ‘here’ even mean in this place, nor in what way any one part of it is connected to the next.

Where I am, who I am, what it all means…

I am afraid to admit it and even more afraid that I must: I have run out of answers. Wandered beyond my depth. All I know is that I am here in the fountain room in the glow of a dwindling flame.

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Going Rogue

☉

Something extraordinary has just happened. Take a look at this:

This was in my bag, but it’s not the configuration I left it in.

The last time I remember holding the cube in my hands, it was solved.

It was right around 1:30 PM when I finished writing the previous (☽) section and went into my bag to get the pencil sharpener.

In the interest of absolute transparency, the cube was not found in the configuration shown above, but one quarter-turn away from it. I only recall that the top row of the white face was turned ninety degrees to the right.

I think this was it, but again, I’m not sure:

You can clearly see what’s supposed to happen next.

The photo’s metadata records that the first photo was taken at 2:31:54 PM, but my Fuji’s clock was exactly one hour fast, so that’s 1:31 PM.

(It’s a Japanese camera, so perhaps it doesn’t automatically adjust for DST.)

A center swap is a pretty easy thing to do on a Rubik’s Cube. After solving, it takes about four moves. I used to do it all the time. Often after I’d solve the cube, I’d finish by swapping the centers because it’s more aesthetically interesting like that.

But some months ago (I don’t recall when) I forgot how to solve a Rubik’s Cube.

First I forgot how to solve the third layer, then I forgot how to solve the second layer, until finally, I could only solve one side — the first layer.

(If you’re just doing it casually, you usually do some layer-by-layer method.)

It’s interesting. It calls to mind a vision I had in November of 2024, right before things started to get bad: I saw the pyramid, and rising floodwaters had engulfed every layer but the capstone.

Forgetting layer by layer how to solve the Rubik’s Cube seems to fit this pattern; as though the floodwaters of oblivion had crept up its sides from the bottom to the top.

I set about re-learning how to solve it about a week ago.

The basic idea was that the memory of how to solve a Rubik’s Cube might be connected to other memories I’d lost. That perhaps the rest of me was “locked inside of it” so to speak, and I might get those pieces back if I broke the encryption.

I didn’t really see it until writing this now, but if we go back to Project Thunderbolt & the Lunar Language, we see something similar.

I find myself in a cubic room. It is about eight feet to each side. The walls are made of limestone.

Set within each of the walls (including the ceiling and the floor) are large squares of polished jade.

All the squares are divided into tiles in a five by five grid. Each of the twenty five tiles is engraved with a glyph, and under each glyph is a braille letter.

So this room, which was a puzzle was structured just like a Rubik’s Cube, except that it was 5x5 instead of 3x3.

It’s as if there are two of me:

• One inside of the memory cube trying to get out.

• One outside of the memory cube trying to get in.

This picture of things seems to have surfaced by itself.

Anyways, I digress.

The point I was getting to is that although I successfully re-learned how to solve the Rubik’s Cube a week ago, I had not yet remembered how to swap the centers.

I tried a few days ago — not very hard mind you, I was mostly just fidgeting, expecting it to just happen by itself. That was how it happened the first time. This time however, I was unsuccessful.

I remember looking perplexed at the now scrambled thing and thinking to myself:

How was it that I did that before?

But I didn’t bother with it further and I never did get a chance to try again.

The point within the point here is: if I did try a center swap a second time and I was successful, that would have been significant. I would have at least noticed that I’d done it and probably wouldn’t immediately forget that I had.

Yet there in my bag was this center-swapped cube.

Any tampering by anyone else was nigh-inconceivable.

Why?

Well, here’s where it gets even stranger: I had held the thing in my hands just two hours before. I had looked at it closely and had seen that it was solved.

Let me tell you how it happened. I remember it all clearly — very clearly in fact.

Please Solve it for Me

I went out in the morning to write. But I still didn’t seem able to write anything I wanted to. It was like someone else within me just wouldn’t be bothered. Just couldn’t be less interested in the direction I was trying to go.

I became angry about this, because I thought I’d seen the end of this problem. I seemed to have hit a ceiling. My state of mind had obviously improved, but not enough. My work requires the attainment of a mental state that still seems to persistently evade me.

So I drove around, sort of ranting to myself, and finally I prayed.

If I recall correctly, the exact request was:

“Please solve this for me. Whatever you want me to see, I’m not seeing and I’m simply not going to left to my own devices. Please solve it for me. I won’t take any credit for it if you do.”

At that exact moment, I glanced to my right and I saw a car drive by with a plate ending in 777.

When I returned to the lot and parked my car, The Windmills of Your Mind had just started playing, so I sat in the car to listen.

I checked the clock. 11:30. (I was being mindful of the time.)

As the song played, I took the cube out of my bag and I stared at it absently for a while. I had solved it last in a hotel room two nights before.

I fidgeted a little. I sort of squashed one of the faces at the corners. Then I held the thing to my cheek. I couldn’t really tell you why, I wasn’t really thinking about it. But I have no recollection of making any turns whatsoever.

The song ended. I turned the car off. The cube went in the bag. It would not come out of the bag again until 1:30, and the bag was at my side for that whole time.

Up the steps and to the apartment I went. At the table I sat and the rest is history — browsing history to be exact. I have the receipts for the remaining time.

From 11:50 onward:

• 40 minutes making travel plans.

• 10 minutes looking up information to interpret a dream.

• 20 minutes checking inboxes.

A few minutes past 1 PM, I closed the laptop with a sigh and wished to live in a world without screens. Then I wrote that fountain part at the beginning, and I was excited about that because at least I was able to write something.

I wrote until I needed a pencil sharpener and reached into the bag.

That was when I found it.

So when and how did it happen?

I mean, it had to have been in the car, right? That’s the logical explanation. But I didn’t exactly know how to do this until I looked it up later. I mean, I used to, and it really isn’t hard, but if at 1 o’clock, you’d asked me:

“Gryphon, how do you swap the centers on a Rubik’s Cube?”

I would have looked up from my notebook and said: “I don’t remember.”

And if you asked me next: “then how did you do it in the car?”

I’d have furrowed my brow and asked: “what are you talking about?”

I don’t know what happened. It’s beyond my powers of reckoning and beyond question in my mind that I — the one writing — had nothing at all to do with it.

In every meaningful sense: God did it and I did not.

But even I can see that it raises a much more important question:

What’s it meant to tell me?

Exegesis

What seems most likely is that it is some kind of symbolically enciphered communication. A message written in the lunar language.

Besides the obvious: “here I am!” it seems to invoke a few bits of symbolic vocabulary.

These terms are: the circumpunct and the octahedron/cube dyad (used in my piece on Rubik’s Cubes: What Is a Teleological Object?)

The circumpunct represents the Self. The dot is the ego. The circle is the unconscious. In this case, the meaning seems to be that the Self is divided. The ego and unconscious are represented here in different colors.

What about the octahedron and cube?

From a Jungian angle, the cube may be seen as a symbol of the ego and the octahedron as the quaternitarian symbol of the Self — that which survives all psychic transformations. Solving the Rubik’s cube thus represents both individuation and the alchemical purification of base matter.

- What is a Teleological Object

Go figure.

The octahedron is a kind of sphere. Two poles and an equator. That’s Heaven. The celestial sphere.

The cube is Earth. The changeable material world.

There are several ways to read it, but no matter how you do, the meaning is the same from all angles: inner and outer are out of step.

If the inner is white, the outer is green.

If the inner is green, the outer is red.

If the inner is red, the outer is white.

A cycle within a cycle, but dysrhythmic.

Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel

- The Windmills of Your Mind

Even so, there’s a consistency. It has a pattern. It’s not as erratic as it would seem from inside. From outside, it’s probably rather predictable.

We could see the centers as the faces of a smaller cube nested within a larger one.

If we imagine it like that, we’ll find that the micro cube and the macro cube are structured according to a shared pattern:

• White opposes yellow

• Blue opposes green

• Red opposes orange

They’re structurally identical. Just one rotation away from snapping back together.

If you remember:

… the cube was not in the exact configuration shown, but one quarter-turn away. I only recall that the top row of the white face was turned ninety degrees to the right.

So then what it seems to mean is: they haven’t aligned yet, but they’re about to.

There is a crack in the wall of the prison cell. A rift growing larger, just wide enough now to hand this cube across and back again.