Congratulations on Solving the Sudoku Puzzle!

You’re going to awake on Thursday night to the buzzing of flourescent lights with no idea where you are and no memory of how you got there. This will be a little unusual. Usually this doesn’t happen until Friday morning and usually you wake up outdoors. This time you’ll be in a windowless concrete room with a pair of what appear to be two-way mirrors affixed to opposite sides. A door will be set in one of the remaining walls and a table with a small book of sudoku puzzles will be sitting at its center.

You’ll swab the inside of your mouth with your tongue but, oddly enough, you won’t taste the residue of alcohol. Instead it will be the terrible sobering flavor of your own flesh. You’ll walk around, testing the door and knocking on the glass for around a minute and a half before a voice booms at you through an unseen speaker.

“Hello, Marcus.” It will be unrecognizable and sexless, filtered mechanically in order to render it inscrutable.

“That’s not my name,” you’ll say, absently toying with the sudoku book. The voice will laugh in response, a terrible rasping sound.

“Let’s not play games, Marcus. I have something important to you.”

As the voice finishes the lights will come up behind one of the two-way mirrors and you’ll see your twin brother Mark there, bound and gagged, suspended over a pit of hyenas. He’ll be in his gym clothes, blood still staining his face from his capture.

“Fuck,” you’ll say, exasperated.

“I’m afraid more than just the American economy will be stripped to the bone if you don’t play along,” the voice will quip. “You’ll follow my directions precisely unless you want to see your precious brother Stephen tossed to the dogs the way you tossed the American citizenry to them.”

You’ll shake your head at the still-concealed two-way mirror. “I’m Steve,” you’ll shout. “That’s Mark! Are you retarded or something?” The voice will laugh again.

“Don’t play games with me, Marcus,” the voice will say, bemusement creeping through the filter. The chain holding your brother will jolt and drop him half a foot, which will get the attention of the waiting hyenas. They’ll all look up suddenly, as if your brother’s calves were the only thing in the world that mattered.

You’ll sigh. “What do you want from me?” you’ll shout at your captor. This will elicit another unsettling bout of laughter, which will by now have become more grating than chilling.

“I want you to solve a puzzle for me, Marucs. If not the one you made.” The voice will be referring to your brother’s prominent position in Lehman Brothers prior to the recent economic collapse. “Pick up the book and turn to page one-seventy-three.”

You’ll grudgingly acquiesce and turn to page 173. The top of the page will read “expert level” and, from the look of things it’ll be quite a doozy. “You want me to solve a sudoku puzzle?” you’ll shout.

The voice will elaborate. “I want you to prove you can work towards making something right, even if it seems impossible. Better act quickly. Your brother’s life depends on it.”

The other two way mirror will light up and a man in an Eyes Wide Shut style mask will be revealed sitting behind a table with an alarm clock in front of him. At least you’ll think it’s a man. They’ll be wearing a form fitting black leotard, but you won’t be able to tell through the mirror if your apparent captor has tits. You don’t want to be sexist, and you find the possibility a little arousing, so you’ll think of your faceless antagonist as a woman as you begrudgingly pick up the puzzle book and get to work.

No doubt your brother would have had a lot of trouble. Despite, or perhaps because of, his success in the business world he was never much of a problem solver. You, though, you’re an unemployable liberal arts student who double majored in Philosophy and English lit. You spend most of your time playing video games and, of course, solving sudoku puzzles in coffee shops where cute girls work.

You’re largely unemployable in the current American market, mostly because you’re a bright young person with everything to offer and not a qualification to your name. You wouldn’t even be able to survive if Mark didn’t give you a hefty allowance from his various private accounts, largely out of a sense of guilt for hogging all the attention when you were kids. But you’re great at sitting down and figuring out systems and then solving problems within them.

You’ll have the “expert” puzzle done in around fifteen minutes. You’ll do a few others, just to kill time and convince the masked figure that you might actually be Mark before you push the finished puzzle up against the two way mirror where your captor will have been sitting pacifically for the last forty five minutes.

They’ll get up, examine the solved puzzle, nod approvingly and then turn off all the lights again. After about fifteen minutes of silence you’ll hear the latch on the door turn and you’ll stumble out to find your brother, still bloody from his previous beating, laying unconscious in a long hallway lined with steel doors. They’ll all look pretty much identical, except for one at the end labeled “exit.”

You’ll heave one last sigh and pick your brother up, carrying him from the warehouse district to the nearest police station where you’ll report the incident. On the whole it’ll be a really big boon for you, since your brother will be so happy to be alive that he’ll double you allowance. If only you had something useful to do with that money it might make your life more fulfilling. Oh well.

Congratulations on Solving the Sudoku Puzzle!