The Magical Labyrinth

"It's custom designed for my back measurements. Here, why don't you just carry my canteen? Actually, I'm very surprised I'm not thirsty. We both have not drunk anything since we came out of our comas. But I just don't feel like drinking at all."

"Me either Rob. Could our bodies have been manipulated not to need water? That seems impossible. Wow, we're one floor directly over the open door now. That water action is pretty impressive."

"For that piece of the spiral not to be filled with water yet implies the spiral is huge. We might need all the time we have. Why doesn't that surprise me? And the water level appears to be rising just as fast as before. Draining into the spiral is not slowing the rise. Additional water must be being pumped into the tank to compensate. Bizarre."

"Not bizarre Robert. Cruel. I think the tank is actively trying to kill us, but for some reason it doesn't mind giving us a chance to escape. I think it woke up Millie just in time for Millie to have a small chance of opening the door for us, and we lucked out. I think the tank is playing a game with us, a very deadly and cruel game."

"It does appear that way. Sometimes reality can be just as it appears, and sometimes appearances can be deceiving. This is a very deep puzzle."

The three kept walking at the brisk pace. Once they descended below the waterline of the tank, the bright light of the tank ceiling was no longer hurting their eyes. Through the crystal clear water, they could see their original room sitting on a submerged pinnacle in the middle of the tank. The pinnacle descended into the depths, the bottom not visible. They both raised their slicker hoods to keep a little extra warmth in the raw 45F air. They kept hiking at a fast pace, and the light very gradually got dimmer and dimmer until after several hours it was so dark they were at the absolute limit of seeing anything at all. They took a short break to get out the flashlights.

"Becky, why don't I let you have the battery flashlight? It has a clip, just attach it to your belt but keep it off for now. I'll use the hand-crank one. We really don't need much light."

"How far to you think we're down Rob?"

"This walk is so featureless, it's a little hard to tell. But I think we've almost kept the 5 mph pace, and it's been almost 4 hours. I would guess we're at about 700 feet below the waterline."

"Wow. The pressure on these transparent walls is over 20 atmospheres now?"

"Yeah, a bit scary I guess. If they do fail though, at least it'll be so fast we'll never know what hit us."

"Well that's a cheerful thought! If you want something a little nicer to think about, just imagine how I've been thinking of seducing you these last hours. I hope I get a chance to show you some of my ideas..."

"Ah, me too. I do love you Becky."

"And I love you. So fiercely it takes my breath away."

They continued the trek, the hours drifting by. Rebecca's mind started to wander from the fatigue and the absolute monotony. Suddenly she called out, "Robert! Look, there's a fork in the tunnel! Are we at the bottom?"

Rebecca turned on the battery flashlight to view a difficult decision. Robert did a time check.

"We're 10 minutes before the 7 hour mark. The water should start falling over the top lip in about 50 minutes. I don't think this is the bottom. The main corridor seems to proceed as before. This little offshoot is less than half the width, we would have to go single file. It also seems to have a tight spiral and descends rapidly, maybe more than a 20-degree slope. We really don't have any information to pick one path versus the other..."

"How about we explore this offshoot for two minutes and rethink?"

"Okay. Keep your flashlight on. Okay if I take the point?"

Two minutes later. "Rob, I think we've spiraled about three times. This seems to go on forever. If we have to backtrack up this incline, our tired muscles are really going to complain."

"Want to go back?"

"I don't want to commit to this path. How about 1 more revolution, and then we backtrack?"

"Okay."

They never got the chance. The corridor dead-ended in another half a turn, a blank solid wall. Shaking their heads in frustration, they began to backtrack up the steep slope.

Rebecca cried out in pain just before they reached the main corridor.

"Becky! What?"

"Oh, my calf cramped, a bad one. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!"

"Sit down, let me massage it." Robert spent the next several minutes kneading the muscle in Becky's leg. Millie waited patiently at the top of the steep ramp. Rebecca was very grateful for the break, and she thought how wonderful her life would be with Robert if they could only survive this crazy situation.

"I think I'm okay now Robert. Thank you. Let's move!"

Continuing downward, they counted numerous branches off the main corridor, the branches occurring about once every three minutes of walking. They continued down the main corridor until it suddenly ended in a dead end. Rebecca gave a wail of anguish from her frustration and cried, "Oh, what is this madness, that feeds our struggle but starves our victory!? Shit! What do we do now? Rob, give me a time check!"

"Seven hours 57 minutes since we started. The water's been going over the top lip now for 17 minutes. It has about a 40-mile path to get to us. I'll make a wild guess that it'll take 20 minutes to build a big wave, which then travels down at 80 mph. Perhaps we have about 35 minutes before getting slammed."

"Let's backtrack to the last fork." They began the hike. "Rob, I counted eighteen additional forks, after the first one that was a dead-end. How many do you think we can test?"

"Realistically? Maybe the three bottom ones. Maybe two of the middle ones. Probably we don't have time to test any of the first ones we passed by."

"Oh, I feel like screaming! How do we choose? The three bottom ones? Do we maximize the number of tunnels we test?"

"I don't know. Let me think while we hike back."

Three minutes later they came to their first fork. "Rob, do you hear a rumble in this tunnel?"

"Yeah, the turbulence of the rushing water above is creating pressure waves in the air, sound waves. It's creating a very low frequency resonant standing wave in these tunnels, sort of like blowing air over the tops of bottles. Microwave ovens work the same way, using a magnetron to blow electrons over a resonance cavity, creating an electric standing wave which vibrates the electrons in the food and... Wait! A tunnel that is not a dead- end won't resonate! Let's move on to the next branch."

They spent the next 15 minutes running up the corridor and testing the branches, listening for the resonant waves. On their sixth branch from the bottom, they suddenly thought they succeeded.

"Rob! No rumble!"

Rob struck a match and held it to the opening. "And the flame is being pulled down too! Air is starting to flow into this tunnel, being pushed by the weight of all the water falling down. This is it!"

Rebecca took the lead, Robert and Millie trailing behind her. The branch seemed identical to the one they had first explored, except there was no dead end. Rather, the tunnel necked down into a pipe.

"Robert, there's a pipe opening in front of me, maybe five feet diameter, maybe a 45 degree slope. The walls feel smooth like glass. Let me hold Millie in my lap and I'll slide down."

They started sliding down the pipe a moment later. The ride was as wild as a roller coaster, with varying run-outs and drop-offs mixed in with both gentle curves and hairpin turns. Rebecca dimly realized the ride would be thrilling if she weren't so terrified. They both finally landed with a plop in a bottom room, Robert rolling a sharp left to avoid crashing into Rebecca's back. Rebecca called out to him, "That pipe was insane! Carnival like! No one would do plumbing like that!"

"I know! There's an oval here by the pipe exit. I'm going to try to close the pipe. I think the water is right behind us!"

Robert spent the next several minutes rapidly keying the oval, Rebecca stood by his side. She felt the air rushing now from the pipe, carrying tiny particles of water that zinged into her blue jeans like stinging micro pellets. The cascading water above was starting to rumble like the approach of a thousand freight trains...

"Becky, this oval isn't musical! It's playing a fast memory game with me, so fast my fingers can't keep up..."

"Move over! I have fast fingers from my violin and I love memory games!"

Rebecca jumped in and began playing, her fingers repeating the long patterns of the rapidly flashing lights, her mind in total concentration and blotting out the hurricane wind blowing next to her. Just as the sound began to hurt her ears the game completed and a door slid down and sealed the pipe. The room was suddenly silent. With the last of her strength, Rebecca said, "We should never press any of the buttons on this oval again. I have a deep intuition that pushing any button would be a signal to open the pipe door, a 5-foot diameter pipe to a 2000-foot vertical pressure head of water. It would kill us instantly." Rebecca then turned and collapsed into Robert's arm, crying in the release of her tension, overcome with both physical and mental exhaustion.

Chapter 5.

Rebecca woke quietly and looked around the room. She was in her bra and panties, covered loosely by her other clothes, lying on top of the air mattress and sleeping bag. Robert was asleep by her side, with one hand resting lightly on her abdomen just above her pubic fur. Millie was curled up in a corner of the room, also fast asleep. Rebecca was grateful for the moment, thankful to have some quiet time for reflection. She began to think of how tired she was just after closing the pipe.

"Wow, nothing like having my life in mortal danger to get my adrenaline flowing! Robert was so kind to undress me and prepare our bed after I ran out of gas. I was so tired! I've never had to hike like that! And Robert carried the pack the whole time... I remember him undressing me. After all my teasing, I was wondering if he wanted to have sex with me, and I was so tired! I lay on my stomach and spread my legs a bit, expecting him to take off my panties and mount me from my rear. But he never did! He was so sweet and understanding, just more massaging of my calf. It felt so good! It's so nice to be petted in love. I do remember the soft caresses of my buttocks over the panties, just before I fell asleep. But they were caresses of promise, not caresses of foreplay. I am so, so happy he thinks my body is sexy!"

Rebecca sat up and looked down at the sleeping Robert. "Patience, Rebecca. A little flirting and playfulness is fine. But build the love first, let the love be the foundation for the sexual union. Don't rush him! He loves you so much, he'll allow you to rush him as a gift to you. But he's being as gentle as he can in slowing you down Rebecca... I don't have to worry about losing him. He has committed to me, I can feel it. I'll let him take my virginity when he's ready to ask for it. It won't be long. I can see the hope and desire for me in his eyes."

"He is male. I should give him the pleasure of courting me, pursuing me, catching me... dominating me? Yes! At our core, we accept each other as equals. But I am his female. I should give him the pleasure of catching me, mounting me as he desires, letting him possess me. Eros is a possessive love. It will be one of the cornerstones of our union, along with our friendship and our caring love for each other. And I am so, so happy he thinks my body is sexy!"

"Good morning Becky! How are you?"

Robert had woken up. Rebecca bent down and kissed him. "Good morning! I'm fine. Ready for our next adventure?"

"Wouldn't miss it." Robert got up wearing just his briefs and looked about the room, then poked his head through the single door on the wall opposite of the closed pipe. "Seems peaceful at least. Comfortably warm too. Two cubical rooms, both about 16 feet in all three dimensions. This room has dark blue for three walls, floor, and ceiling, and a glowing yellow wall with the door. The next room has a mixture of red, green and blue for the walls, floor and ceiling, some glowing, some not. There are no doors except the one back to this room. But there's a spiral staircase in the middle that goes up. I guess our one option is to go up the staircase."

Rob and Becky spent a few minutes getting dressed and gathering their things. "Rob, I'm going to put Millie's collar on. Perhaps in the future we might need your rope as a leash for her... Rob, look at this!" Rob came over and saw a defined pinkish rectangle at the back of Millie's neck, entirely devoid of fur. "What do you think it means?"

"Not sure. Let me try something." Rob got out his thermos, took the cup, and poured some water in it. He then set it down on the floor with some dried beef jerky for Millie. Millie came over happily and looked at the food, but then looked confused. She sniffed the food for a moment, then lost interest and walked away. "Becky, I think you're conjecture is correct, impossible as it seems. We don't seem to need food or water anymore. This is probably an important clue to the big picture of what's going on, but I can't figure it out."

A few minutes later they were climbing the spiral staircase in the second room, entering the room above it. The staircase continued for another flight, and there was also a door on a yellow wall, with the other surfaces of blues and greens, some glowing, some not. Robert suddenly realized what they were dealing with. "A bunch of twisty, turning passages, all different!"

"The ancient Adventure maze, Rob? These different colors and intensities on the walls do provide a unique signature for each room. The number of combinations possible must be in the thousands. A huge 3-D maze? This will take an eternity to figure out! Do you think we'll find the 8-inch platinum pyramid along the way?"

"Ha! Probably not. We need though to start making a 3-D map of the maze. I'll reserve a bunch of pages in my notebook, one page for each level, start tracing the connections. Also we'll log the color patterns. This will help us from getting lost as we backtrack. Depending on the size of the maze, we'll probably be doing a lot of backtracking... This could really take a while. I turned off my cell phone last night, by the way. It was important to know the time in the spiral, but not now."

Robert and Rebecca began their efforts to solve the maze. In their first day, they concluded that that one wall of each cube (always in what they labeled the north direction) was red, yellow, or a black and white checkerboard color. The other five surfaces of the cubes were always green or blue. Each wall could either glow or not, providing 6 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 color possibilities, for a total of 6144 choices. The number of entrances to the rooms would also vary, from one (a dead-end) to six (the room Rebecca labeled the grand junction). Well over 50% of all the rooms were called conduit rooms, containing just two openings.

And the days flowed by. Mapping the maze was slow boring work that took little thought, and they spent most of the time talking to each other, sharing their values and their hopes and dreams for their futures. Both made the effort to help the other understand their personality and desires. Both recognized the bonds of trust and commitment that they were nurturing. Both were thrilled to be planning and dreaming of their future lives together. And the days flowed by...

Rebecca looked up from her analysis with the notebook. "Ready for my review of the new data?" It was the end of their fourteenth day in the maze, and it was Rebecca's turn to study the maps while Robert set up their sleep site and played with the dog.

Robert gave Millie a last pat on her head and got up from wrestling with her. "Sure! Find anything exciting?"

"Not really, which is a good thing. Everything we've found today fits our baseline model of the maze, that it's a 19 by 19 by 19 cube of cubical rooms. Whoever built this place really likes the number 19! Anyway, today we passed the 80% mark on the number of rooms visited. Baseline model of 6859 rooms total, and we've seen 5549 of them. Assuming our travel so far is a good statistical sample, our baseline model estimates this maze contains 361 dead-end rooms, 6144 conduit rooms, 256 rooms with 3 openings, 81 rooms with 4 openings, and 16 rooms with five openings, with most of them clustered around the grand junction room we found at the exact center of the maze. I don't know what we'll do if we finally explore all the rooms and don't find a way out. Opening the pipe in the entrance room will kill us, I'm sure of it." Rebecca was already dressed for bed, down to her bra and panties. She closed the notebook and lay face down on the sleeping bag, stretching out and relaxing and getting comfortable. "Rub my back?"

"You bet!" and a few seconds later Rebecca felt Robert's hands beginning to kneed the muscles in the small of her back. She sighed in contentment and stretched out our arms and legs a bit, arching her back and uncurling her fingers and toes in rhythm with the soothing massage of her back. After a minute she turned her head in Robert's direction and smiled. Robert had already stripped to his briefs for bed, and Rebecca enjoyed seeing the outline of his obvious erection, her mind in quiet thought: "Ah, I enjoy flirting with you, dearest Robert. All I have to do is spread my legs, open my thighs for you a bit, and your erection pops right up! It's quite an evening dance we do. I love it when your massage drops to my buttocks, and finishes with caressing my thighs. Perhaps tonight I should take this dance a little further. I caressed your penis lightly through your briefs last night. I wonder if you'd like for me to reach my hand inside them tonight..."

"What are you thinking, Becky?"

"How much I love you. How much I enjoy what you're doing right now. Dreaming about getting sexy with you... If I turn over, will you still pet me?"

Becky was thrilled to feel Robert's hands slide across her panties and down to her thighs. She gasped at the pleasure of it. "Sure! Turn over!"

Becky rotated and lay on her back, enjoying the caresses on the tops of her thighs. She opened her legs in invitation, and was delighted to have the invitation accepted, feeling Robert caressing both her inner thighs just below her vulva. "Oh, that feels so nice!" Her breathing slowed and deepened, and she began to fantasize about taking her panties off. She looked into Robert's eyes, and found them full of hope and love. She smiled up at him and closed her eyes.

Within a few minutes Rebecca felt a dampness on the bottom of her panties, and realized how aroused she had become. She lifted her hips in invitation, and was thrilled to feel Robert's hands on her panties, pulling them down and off her legs. Rebecca lowered her legs again, but even further apart, offering Robert full access to her. She heard Robert gasp.

"Oh Becky, you are so beautiful. I love you so... You're so beautiful..." Robert's fingers began to stroke her dense, silky pubic fur. Rebecca could feel her lubrication building up between the inner and outer folds of her labia. She sat up and began pulling Robert's briefs off. He eagerly helped her, and hugged her as he unclasped her bra.

They rolled back down to the sleeping bag hugging each other, and Rebecca reached down and softly wrapped her hand around his penis. She looked into his eyes and saw only laughter and love and acceptance. Thrilled that all of his shyness was gone, she sat up while keeping one hand placed upon his breast, holding him down in a prone position.

Rebecca looked at the erect penis in her hand, and could feel it throbbing in its eagerness to penetrate her. She began a rhythmic contraction of her hand, and soon had Robert's hips thrusting up into her hand in synch with her contractions. She timed her grip so that Robert would have to thrust in to penetrate, sliding the loose outer skin of his penis back in timing with the upward stroke of his hips. She wetted the fingers of her other hand and swirled them around the exposed head of his penis. Robert was gasping uncontrollably at the pleasure.