FADE IN:

INT. CUBE

BALD WEIRDO JULIAN RICHINGS wakes up inside a weird, empty, vaguely cyberpunk-looking CUBE.

JULIAN RICHINGS

Hey check me out, I’m that guy from this movie’s poster, whose striking bug-eyed skull-faced appearance makes the audience immediately intrigued as to who I am and what my deal is! Well now prepare to find out, as you join me in this-

He walks into the NEXT ROOM and is INSTANTLY DICED by THE WORLD’S STRONGEST CHICKEN WIRE.

JULIAN RICHINGS

(falling apart into little cubes)

Well at least we’re showing commitment to the whole “cube” motif.

(dies)

INT. DIFFERENTLY-COLORED CUBE

A bleeding DAVID HEWLETT stumbles into a near-identical CUBE where MAURICE DEAN WINT is.

DAVID HEWLETT

Gah, tell you what, this is the worst escape room I’ve ever done, Jesus.

MAURICE DEAN WINT

Ah, so you too mysteriously blacked out and then woke up imprisoned in this bizarre sadistic death-puzzle scenario I take it?

DAVID HEWLETT

Yes, it’s very Saw, except I guess that movie doesn’t exist yet so we’re in the clear.

(pause)

Come to think of it, neither does The Maze Runner, or Predators. Shit, did we actually invent this genre?

Then NICOLE DE BOER, NICKY GUADAGNI, and WAYNE ROBSON also stumble upon this room.

NICOLE DE BOER

Oh hey, we were all dumped into separate rooms of this maze, but despite none of us having any idea where to go and us all just trying doors at random, here we all are winding up in the same room at the same time, almost immediately! I’d say the odds of that happening are almost literally zero.

NICKY GUADAGNI

Well we’re all here now, so we should team up and work out a plan of action. Obviously the first step is to sit down and compare notes, so we have maximum data about the nature of this place, and can work out the best strategy for-

WAYNE ROBSON

NEERRRD. Shut up with that boring bullshit, I propose instead that we exchange virtually zero information, instead less than five minutes after meeting up we just start blundering through rooms in the hope that we tumble out an exit eventually.

(takes off boot)

We can just hurl our boots into each room first, to check for traps! As long as there are no more than ten trap rooms in this whole unknowably-large maze, and every single trap can be triggered by a shoe plopping down on the floor, we should be fine.

NICKY GUADAGNI

What? That barely qualifies as a plan! Come on man, couldn’t we at least take turns describing the traps we’ve already witnessed first? Like, David’s literally bleeding from a trap he escaped. Maybe we should ask him the nature and location of that one trap. That seems like the bare minimum amount of thought we could put into this.

WAYNE ROBSON

(passing through into next room)

Pffft, you think too much, by which I mean at all! You should trust my instincts, I’m a famous and prolific prison escape artist, which is a striking piece of backstory which makes the audience immediately intrigued as to who I am and what my deal i-

A TRAP instantly MELTS HIS ENTIRE FACE OFF.

WAYNE ROBSON

AAARGHGBLLBLURGH, MAYBE WHEN I HEARD A TRAP MECHANISM GOING OFF AT EYE-LEVEL I SHOULD HAVE DUCKED INSTEAD OF POINTING MY FACE DIRECTLY AT IT

(dies)

MAURICE DEAN WINT

Okay then, at least we’ve worked out one rule of the cube: if the audience ever starts to get invested in you, you die. So everybody be careful to not be especially interesting or engaging characters, got it?

NICKY GUADAGNI

But hey, the fact that melty-face there was an escape artist raises the possibility that we were each chosen for our useful abilities which we can use to survive this place. For example, I’m a doctor. So clearly I’ll be useful when the time comes for medical stuff!

(medical stuff never happens)

...Oh.

MAURICE DEAN WINT

But I’m a police officer, so surely my skill with tactics and crisis management will eventually prove-

(nope that never really matters either)

Wow, really?

DAVID HEWLETT

Er well I work in an office which specializes in not building death cubes, why I’ve never built a giant death cube in my life so SHUT UP. What about you, Nicole? Do you have any special skills?

NICOLE DE BOER

None that I can think of, sorry. I’m just a regular person.

DAVID HEWLETT

You sure? You can’t think of one thing you’re good at?

NICOLE DE BOER

Nope, I’m just completely ordinary in every way. Not a single notable characteristic about me, no sir. I’m just a boring old normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill mathematical genius with an eidetic memory.

(pause)

Oh wait, unless THAT counts as a skill I guess.

DAVID HEWLETT

(facepalms)

You know, it just might? What about the little rows of numbers at the entrance to each room, is there anything math about them we should know about?

NICOLE DE BOER

Oh, the rooms are distinct numbered entities? Weird, I thought it was just the one same room over and over again but with different-colored lights shining through the walls-

DAVID HEWLETT

NO IT IS MANY SEPARATE ROOMS IN THIS HUGE CUBIC MAZE, NOT A SINGLE EMPTY SOUND STAGE THAT WE KEEP REUSING OVER AND OVER BECAUSE WE HAVE THE SAME BUDGET AS AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL PLAY, WHY WOULD YOU EVEN THINK THAT.

NICOLE DE BOER

Right right sorry, silly me, how could I ever have mistaken this blue room for the previous brown but otherwise indistinguishable one. Anyway, the numbers.

(mathematizes)

Aha, I’ve got it! The rooms with traps all have prime numbers at their entrances!

MAURICE DEAN WINT

Wait, you’ve seen what, two or three trap rooms so far? How can you possibly have enough data to come to that conclusion?

NICOLE DE BOER

Logically I shouldn’t, but let's just assuming my answer is correct anyway and that we’re safe if we just avoid prime-number rooms! See, it IS a test, they’ve given us all the tools we need to work out how to get out of here!

MAURICE DEAN WINT

Sure, you can find all the information you need. You know, once you’ve already trial-and-errored your way through a bunch of rooms and set off multiple deadly traps, that is. And as long as your math genius isn’t one of the ones who gets flame-broiled. This test is BULLSHIT.

NICOLE DE BOER

Maybe so, but at least we know how to proceed safely. Let’s go!

NICKY GUADAGNI

Wait, so we’ve actually figured out how to circumvent all the traps? Twenty minutes in, we’re already ditching the entire “murder room” premise?

NICOLE DE BOER

We’re not made of crappy CGI, lady. There will in fact be zero trap-related fatalities for the entire remainder of the movie.

NICKY GUADAGNI

Seriously? Not to be too insulting to horror fans, but I’m pretty sure you just lost about half your audience right there.

NICOLE DE BOER

Look, we really aren’t kidding about the budget of this thing, okay? Like, when we were planning the wrap party it turned out that the only two options we could afford were either a single medium cheese pizza from Domino’s, or making the entire movie all over again but with better special effects.

(shrugs)

So we’re having to do what thousands of broke-ass independent makers of horrors, thrillers, and crime movies have done before us, and resort to the old “characters turning on each other” source of conflict. Oh, and of course that means one of us is going to have to eventually turn out to be an unstable psycho, NOT IT!

NICKY GUADAGNI AND DAVID HEWLETT

Not it!

MAURICE DEAN WINT

Not - FUCK.

INT. ROOM AFTER ROOM AFTER DEFINITELY MORE THAN JUST THE ONE ROOM

The group starts working their way through the interchangeable ROOMS, each time checking for PRIME NUMBERS to makes sure that every room they pass through is BORINGLY TRAP-FREE. At one point they hear a strange GRINDING SOUND through the WALLS.

NICKY GUADAGNI

Hmm, that same strange sound seems to occur roughly every seven minutes. I wonder what it means.

DAVID HEWLETT

Yes, it sure is a puzzler. Is it accompanied, perchance, by the sensation of the room we’re in moving around horizontally and/or vertically?

NICKY GUADAGNI

Uhh, why, whatever are you talking about? Surely there’s no way to tell if the room you’re in is moving around, what nonsense!

(scoffs)

Now as long as nobody in the audience has ever been on an elevator or any other kind of moving platform, we just might get away with this.

They continue from room to room. Eventually they find a room where every exit is a trap except for the one in the CEILING. But when they open THAT DOOR, ANDREW MILLER falls out and lands on MAURICE.

MAURICE DEAN WINT

OOF. Okay, this isn’t one of the more deadly traps, but I gotta give them points for creativity.

ANDREW MILLER

No, I’m another prisoner in here like you guys! I have severe autism, as well as all the behavioral tics that pop culture expects from autistic characters at this point of cinematic history. Definitely. Kmart. I’m an excellent driver.

NICOLE DE BOER

Oh, so if we’re going all the way with the cliché, does that mean you’re a savant whose innate genius with numbers is-

ANDREW MILLER

Oh hey hey hey now, shut up and please don’t make that connection, that’s meant to be a twist.

MAURICE DEAN WINT

Wait a minute, if there’s a whole other person we didn’t know about, that means I still have time to say “not-

ANDREW MILLER

NOT IT!

MAURICE DEAN WINT

OH FUCK YOU. You know what, I’m looking forward to murdering you jerks.

They continue on through the ROOMS. At one point MAURICE heads into a supposedly safe ROOM, when suddenly:

NICOLE DE BOER

Maurice! LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU!

MAURICE DEAN WINT

(turns)

Oh fuck, a very slow-moving bunch of wires has completely encircled me!! ...So why did I have to turn around to see it?

He gets out of the TRAP and escapes back to the PREVIOUS ROOM.

MAURICE DEAN WINT

Well so much for your stupid fucking prime number theory, Nicole! Fuck you! AND FUCK THE REST OF YOU ALSO! BLARGH!!

NICKY GUADAGNI

Starting in on the psychotic asshole phase of your characterization, are we?

MAURICE DEAN WINT

DAMN STRAIGHT AND I’M GOING ALL IN ON IT! For starters, I hate Andrew for being mentally handicapped! Wasting our time babysitting this useless moron, I mean he’s already peed right in one of the cube rooms, what an animal!

NICKY GUADAGNI

Well yeah, of course he went in the cube. Where the fuck else is he supposed to go?

MAURICE DEAN WINT

AND YOU! I just have a general across-the-board antagonism for you, the things you say automatically piss me off, who cares why!

(wheels around on Nicole)

And YOU! ...Actually I kind of like you.

NICOLE DE BOER

Oh?

MAURICE DEAN WINT

But, you know. For kinda gross reasons.

NICOLE DE BOER

Oh. OH. Ew.

DAVID HEWLETT

Ooh, do me next!

MAURICE DEAN WINT

YOU I think are a spy who’s in on this whole torture-maze thing.

DAVID HEWLETT

Okay, uhm, that conclusion kinda came out of nowhere, don’t you think? Is it based on, y’know, anything at all?

MAURICE DEAN WINT

Well... you haven’t really been making yourself useful in getting us out of here. And sure Nicky hasn’t really done anything either, or me for that matter, but-

DAVID HEWLETT

(snapping)

THERE IS NO WAY OUT OF HERE!

The group collectively GASPS. An ominous CHORD plays from a PIPE ORGAN somewhere. NICOLE FAINTS. MAURICE, lacking anything to DRINK, has to MIME a SPIT TAKE.

DAVID HEWLETT

...What? What I said sounded exactly like a general thing that anybody in this situation might say out of frustration.

MAURICE DEAN WINT

Nuh uh, we’re counting it as a full confession to the whole spy thing! Now spill!

DAVID HEWLETT

UGH FINE, you got me, your dumb random guess was correct. I helped design the exterior wall thing which sits around the cube.

MAURICE DEAN WINT

So this wall is completely solid with no entrances or exits?

DAVID HEWLETT

No, it has a big doorway you can leave through.

MAURICE DEAN WINT

(pause)

So when you said there was no way out of here... what the fuck were you talking abouit?

DAVID HEWLETT

(pause)

I have no idea.

NICOLE DE BOER

But hey, using the dimensions you’ve given us for the exterior wall, we can calculate the size of the cube itself! Turns out it’s twenty-six rooms wide.

DAVID HEWLETT

Twenty-six? Not twenty-seven?

NICOLE DE BOER

(checks figures)

Nope, definitely twenty-six.

DAVID HEWLETT

Oh. Okay. Just, you know... twenty-seven is a cube.

NICOLE DE BOER

Huh, that’s right! Bit of a missed opportunity I guess. Anyway-

DAVID HEWLETT

(grumbling to self)

A twenty-seven-wide cube would have consisted of twenty-seven nine-by-nine cubes, which themselves would have consisted of twenty-seven three-by-three cubes, which themselves would have consisted of twenty-seven individual cubes, it would have been cubes within cubes within cubes, BUT SURE TWENTY-SIX IS JUST AS GOOD I GUESS I MEAN WHATEVER

NICOLE DE BOER

Are you done? This revelation prompts me to realize that the numbers on each room are Cartesian coordinates, coordinates in three-dimensional space, telling us where the rooms are situated within the cube!

NICKY GUADAGNI

How does the fact that the cube is twenty-seven rooms wide make you realize this? Shouldn’t you have realized it as soon as you knew we were in a cube?

NICOLE DE BOER

Probably! The point is that I can now calculate where the nearest edge is, and we can head in that direction!

DAVID HEWLETT

Okay, but we’ve been heading in one direction for like a dozen rooms now. So surely by now the nearest edge is in that direction. Which means your little discovery won’t affect our strategy in the slightest.

NICOLE DE BOER

SHUT UP, THIS IS REAL MATHS WE’RE USING HERE GUYS, IT’S VERY CLEVER BE IMPRESSED.

INT. TRAP ROOM

The GROUP comes across a TRAP ROOM.

DAVID HEWLETT

Damnit, another trap room. Guess we’ll have to backtrack and-

MAURICE DEAN WINT

Hold on, let’s find out how the trap works and see if we can bypass it.

DAVID HEWLETT

What? We’ve never done that with any other trap room, we’ve skipped them all even when it sent us right out of our way. Why is this one different?

MAURICE DEAN WINT

Because we thought of a cool suspense scene to do. Now, this trap is sound-activated, so let’s just sneak through it very quietly. Let’s go!

NICOLE DE BOER

Hold it! How do we know sound is the only thing that triggers the trap? Maybe it’s also set off by body heat, or pressure on the floor, like the scene from last year’s Mission: Impossible that we’re so obviously borrowing from?

MAURICE DEAN WINT

I said GO!

NICKY GUADAGNI

Shouldn’t we at least take a minute to test what volume sound will set off-

MAURICE DEAN WINT

MOVE, DAMNIT!

They one by one slink through the SOUND ROOM. But at the last seconds, ANDREW makes a sound which nearly gets MAURICE sliced to ribbons! MAURICE escapes the ROOM and starts BEATING UP ANDREW.

NICKY GUADAGNI

Stop it, you neanderthal! You’re just a big old fascist bully, aren’t you? I bet you beat your wife and kids too! And you’re stupid and ugly and probably you have a very small penis and ohhh fuck I’m gonna be the first one you murder, aren’t I.

INT. EDGE

Finally they reach the EDGE of the CUBE, and find there is about a TEN-FOOT GAP between it and the EXTERIOR WALL.

MAURICE DEAN WINT

No problem, we can fashion our clothes into a rope and one of us can swing across.

DAVID HEWLETT

And then what? That person is meant to scale the almost completely vertical wall to reach the exit? How do the rest of us get out?

MAURICE DEAN WINT

Oh it’s fine, this plan is obviously gonna fail anyway so we don’t need a next step.

Indeed, they try to swing NICKY across the gap but she slips and falls! MAURICE grabs her.

MAURICE DEAN WINT

(Nicky dangling from arm)

Wow, that was dangerous! I could have easily been pulled down myself while doing that. And to think that I only even did it so I could MURDER YOU PERSONALLY

(lets go)

I mean seriously, that’s some hardcore spite right there.

NICKY plummets to her DEATH, and MAURICE turns to the others with a sheepish “WHOOPSIE” SHRUG.

DAVID HEWLETT

(narrowing eyes)

Something tells me that wasn’t an accident.

MAURICE DEAN WINT

Whoa, suspicious much? Hey, tensions are clearly riding high right now. How about let’s just rest for a while, we can get some much-needed sleep, I can try to rape Nicole and murder you, just decompress a little.

DAVID HEWLETT

What?

MAURICE DEAN WINT

What?

These things HAPPEN. MAURICE tries to get fresh with NICOLE, then hurls DAVID into a random room, where he finds:

DAVID HEWLETT

Oh shit, it’s Wayne’s corpse! This whole time we’ve been going back through rooms we’ve already visited!

(pause)

Okay yeah, I’m pretty glad we’ve been refraining from peeing in the cube now.

NICOLE DE BOER

(snaps fingers)

I’ve got it! That grinding noise - the rooms are moving! The cube is constantly rearranging itself!

MAURICE DEAN WINT

Oh no! What happens when every side is a solid color?!

NICOLE DE BOER

Shut up. But hey, this means that those numbers on the rooms mustn’t be Cartesian coordinates after all, they’re describing the way the rooms move through the cube! THIS IS STILL REAL MATHS, EVERYBODY LOOK HOW SMART WE ARE!!

DAVID HEWLETT

Wait, they’re not Cartesian coordinates? But your estimate of where the edge of the cube would be, based on the assumption that the numbers WERE Cartesian coordinates...

NICOLE DE BOER

Was one hundred percent correct, yes, please disregard that ridiculous coincidence.

(snaps fingers again)

And I just realized that an earlier room, according to its numbers, must be a sort of bridge room which travels right out to the exterior wall and lets you leave! It cycles over there every several weeks, and is due to reach it - oh hey, like an hour from now, what are the odds.

(snaps fingers yet again)

And I ALSO just realized what I got wrong about the prime numbers thing! Turns out it’s not just prime numbers, but prime POWERS, which are so much more common that it’s weird that our prime-number system didn’t fail WAY earlier. Unfortunately they’re too complex for my super-mega-math-brain to calculate! If only we had access to, say, an ULTRA-HYPER-super-mega-math-brain...

(gives Andrew significant glance)

ANDREW MILLER

Okay, you’re right, it’s about time for that twist.

ANDREW starts instantly calculating all the ROOM NUMBERS to determine which rooms are SAFE, which is nice and all but MAYBE NEXT TIME YOU’RE STUCK IN A BIG DEADLY MATH PUZZLE YOU SHOULD BE A BIT QUICKER ABOUT MENTIONING YOUR MATH POWERS, ANDREW.

DAVID HEWLETT

This is going great! Now there are no more dangers for us to have to survive.

MAURICE DEAN WINT

(making strangling motions with hands)

MURDER MURDER RAPE BLUDGEON MURDER

DAVID HEWLETT

Oh yeah, that guy. Uh, hey Maurice, look over there!

(drops Maurice through floor door)

Psych! Let’s go, Nicole and Andrew!

Leaving MAURICE bleeding on the floor, they hurry through the CUBE until they reach the BRIDGE ROOM.

NICOLE DE BOER

Oh, ha ha, would you look at that on the floor, it's a shard of my glasses that I lost in that first ever room. Turns out we started in the bridge room! We would have been better off never moving at all! Yep, literally no good has come from our moving through the maze, ha ha.

ANDREW MILLER

(pouts)

NICOLE DE BOER

At any rate, we made it! Aw man this is gonna be cathartic, seeing us finally get out. It’s especially nice to see me, the one who did almost all the useful work, easily the least annoying of this movie’s shrill unlikable characters, get the happy ending that I worked so hard to-

(spike emerges from chest)

glerp

(dies)

And just as the audience is starting to think that it would be absolutely TYPICAL of this place to put a trap in the only ESCAPE ROOM which triggers right when you manage to ESCAPE, like that would be absolutely fucking ON-BRAND for this shithole, we PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE SEEN THAT COMING, it turns out that she was in fact stabbed by MAURICE!

DAVID HEWLETT

What the fuck?! We left you bleeding and unconscious a whole bunch of rooms back! And we only managed to navigate our way here with the help of TWO mathematical geniuses! AND THE MAZE HAS REARRANGED ITSELF AT LEAST ONCE SINCE THEN! How in the living FUCK did you find us?!

MAURICE DEAN WINT

By now I’ve gone so cartoonishly evil that I’ve developed Jason Voorhees teleportation powers, I guess!

DAVID HEWLETT

Well thanks a bunch for making an already grim movie even more bleak and unmotivating! Let’s just murder each other, fuck it.

They FIGHT and both DIE. Then finally the BRIDGE ROOM moves over to the EXTERIOR WALL, and the DOOR OPENS to reveal SUNLIGHT, and ANDREW LEAVES! Audience member REYNAULD McDIDDERSBY applauds wildly.

REYNAULD MCDIDDERSBY

Hooray, the most opaque and one-dimensional character, with the least amount of lines, has wandered out to somewhere bright, blurry and ambiguous! It’s the exact ending I’ve been hoping for!! I’m so satisfied!!!

He becomes the ONLY PERSON EVER to THINK or SAY THIS.

END.