The Escape Room

For her thirtieth birthday, Vesna wanted something more exciting than dinner and cake, so she booked an escape room for herself and four friends. The theme was "The Sinking Submarine." The rules were simple: the team had sixty minutes to find the secret code, open the hatch and escape before the room "flooded."

A bored young employee showed them in through the hatch, a heavy round door painted gray, and pulled it shut behind them. "If you need a hint, just wave at the camera," he said through a speaker. Then a red light came on, a siren started, and a recorded voice announced, "Sixty minutes until the submarine floods."

Femi, who takes puzzles very seriously, went straight to a panel of colored buttons. "If we press them in the right order, something will open," he said. He spent fifteen minutes trying every possible order. Nothing opened.

Meanwhile, Brigid found an old map covered in numbers and insisted that it was the code. Taro tried her numbers on a locked metal box. Then he tried his birthday, Vesna's birthday and 1234. The box stayed closed. Sunil kept looking for secret messages behind the pipes, and found only a sticker that said "Hands off the pipes, please."

With ten minutes left, the siren got louder and blue light began to rise up the walls like water. Nobody had waved at the camera, because Femi said that hints were for beginners. Vesna sat down on the floor and started laughing. "If this were a real submarine," she said, "we'd all be fish food by now."

Sunil, exhausted from searching, leaned against the hatch to rest. It swung open so suddenly that he fell out into the hallway.

For a moment, nobody said anything. Then Brigid asked the question that everyone was thinking. "Did anyone try just pushing it?" Nobody had. Nobody had locked it. It had been open the whole time.

They walked out in silence, past a small control room with its door open. Inside, the bored young employee was sitting in front of a screen that showed their empty submarine. On his knees was a big bowl of popcorn, and he was clearly enjoying the best show of his week.