Operation Justice Unlimited: Parasol Para-solutions

I and a few other Mystic Fishies entered Global Blends Coffee. About half of the cafe patrons were Gamers, about half civilians. I watched as a member of Team XX-Rated ordered a mocha "Justice Style." It arrived with a cocktail umbrella and a special napkin. Okay. Game Control had probably set this up with the cafe's manager. If we ordered coffee "Justice Style," it would come with an umbrella and napkin. Those would contain our clue.

Some civilians ordered coffee. If they wondered about the crowd of intense people with cocktail umbrellas, they did not ask about it. They might not have noticed: they had not yet had their morning coffee. I watched another team order coffee, pick up coffee, umbrella, napkin.

I ordered a drip coffee, "Justice Style". The manager asked what size, and when I said "large", she gave a sad shake of the head. When the coffee arrived, it had no umbrella, no napkin. Uh-oh. Were we supposed to order some particular kind of coffee Justice Style? Or a particular size? Maybe there was some puzzle we were supposed to solve first to figure out what kind of beverage we were supposed to order "Justice Style"? XX-Rated had ordered a mocha. Maybe I should get back in line and order a small, medium, and large mocha, all Justice Style?

The manager heard our worried conversation and asked: "Oh, did you order that coffee 'Justice Style'?" and then she gave us an umbrella and a napkin.

It was a hot sunny morning. Sitting in the van was not a pleasant option. So we sprawled out on the edge of a planted area on Mountain View's Castro Street. It was too hot for sweaters, for overshirts. Soon we were in t-shirts, and the smell of 25 hours of running, solving, and sitting in a van wafted forth.

When we opened up the cocktail umbrella, we saw that someone had painted marks on its spokes. When I first saw them, I thought "resistor markings," but that was just because I was a geek. When we looked more closely, we saw that there were only five colors of paint (resistors use ten). But the colors were obviously brimming with information.

A clue hidden in a drink umbrella? My kitsch-veined soul swelled with joy. These Game Control people must be awesome to think of such a thing.

The napkin had been decorated with a sticker. The sticker showed a spiral. Did that mean we should spin the umbrella like a top? Someone had a better idea: this meant that instead of reading the color-marks by spoke or by ring, we should read them in spiral order.

It was at this point that we started relating the colors to the London Tube Map--one of the items from our box of crap. I am ashamed to relate that we did this only because one of us had spotted another team using their London Tube Map. We played with various theories for a while. One the spiral whose big mark was yellow, about half of the smaller marks were also yellow.

So if the big mark was yellow, maybe that corresponded to the yellow line on the London Tube map. Maybe a blue mark on that spiral corresponded to a place where the map's yellow line intersected the blue line. Maybe each sequence of six marks consisted of a line color and five adjacent stations on that line--each little mark that was a color represented a station where two lines intersected; each little mark whose color matched that of the big mark was a station that was not an intersection. This was a wonderful theory, but did not survive. We could not find sequences of stations that fit.

Some of us gave up on the Tube map. But what did that leave us with? We had sequences of six colors. Braille came in sixes. Was it Braille?

We sat. We tried and discarded various theories. Team Drunken Spider walked by, and Dwight chatted with a couple of them. I don't know what the locals thought of these clumps of people sitting along the street, muttering to each other about color sequences.

We decided to call Game Control for a hint. They handed us the answer: The London Tube Map had nothing to do with it. We were on the right track with the spiral. We should have treated each spiral's big mark as a reference color, then treated the rest of each spiral as 5-bit binary: each matching color mark represented a binary 1. We confirmed our data--and found out that half the team was using incorrectly transcribed data. Unfortunately, this was the same half of the team that had been testing the correct solving method.

(Lesson learned: Don't copy other teams. If you copy them and end up doing the wrong thing, you feel twice as dumb.)

With the right data and solving method, we quickly figured out our message: CODE VORTEX. Soon we called Game Control and had our next destination: Overfelt Gardens in San Jose.

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