Cubes of Foundation
The Cubes of Foundation are powerful items in the Zork series of computer games which contain the essence of magic. Appearing as small, totally featureless white cubes were a by-product of the tools used by the Implementors when the world was being laid down, each one existing as a physical means to tap into and control a fundamental component of the world (possibly a reference to the computer programming concept of pointers).
The plot of the game Spellbreaker revolves around these cubes. Four of the cubes represent the four classical elements, four represent the principles of light, dark, life and death (a possible nod to Dungeons and Dragons and its positive energy and negative energy), four represent the abstract principles of chance, connectivity, time, and the mind, four represent principles unknown, and the seventeenth "central" cube represents the concept of magic, which binds the world of Zork together. At the beginning of the game, magic is beginning to fail across the land of Zork, and the player's magic powers have become unpredictable and unreliable. As the player collects more and more cubes, her magic regains its strength in relation to spells linked to the cubes she has found. (For instance, finding the Change Cube increases the reliability of the snavig shapeshifting spell or the caskly repair spell.) When the final cube which controls magic itself is found, the player's magic powers increase greatly, allowing her to memorize an unlimited number of spells and use them with great power.
The Shadow, the game's antagonist, begins by having already captured the four unknown cubes (unknown because they remain in his possession for the game's duration) as well as the cube of Earth. The player then goes on a quest to find the other cubes, with the help of the blorple spell, a spell apparently either found or created by the Shadow that enables the player to "enter" a Cube of Foundation and teleport to other Cubes' locations by virtue of the "mystic connections" between the cubes. The blorple spell sends the player to a magical "cube-shaped room" whose appearance is based on that of the principle the Cube represents -- the Fire Cube is a room made entirely of fire, the Change Cube is a room with constantly changing furniture and decor, the Mind Cube is a completely empty space where the occupant only exists as a disembodied mind, etc. Each cube-shaped room contains various exits which can be used to teleport to various locations thematically linked to the principle of the cube (the Water Cube, for instance, leads to the ocean floor, an open pipeline in a castle basement, a collapsed aqueduct in an ancient temple, and a frozen glacier) each of which is somehow key to recovering one of the next cubes.
Some of the cubes have been lost and lie in wilderness environments (including one that seems to exist in a different world entirely from the main Zork universe), while others have apparently been recognized as valuable objects and kept under strict guard by various factions across space and time. Many of the locations in the game are connected in a way the player does not discover until he has unlocked various secrets -- it eventually transpires that much of the game takes place in and around the same castle, which houses several of the cubes and was apparently meant to protect them. At one point, the player even discovers that one particular group is not only aware of the power of the cubes but of the blorple spell's use in traveling between them -- the player appears inside a heavily guarded vault whose defenses are geared to stop invaders who appear inside the vault rather than attempt to enter it from outside, apparently expecting people to teleport in.
Other hints that the cube's functions had been known and explored by previous great mages include an ogre who guards not only a Cube of Foundation but a device that can be used to identify Cubes of Foundation -- any cube placed inside will generate a design on the box that symbolically represents the principle that cube has dominion over. This is a highly valuable function, since cubes are impossible to tell apart visually, and require the player to use a magic burin to label the cubes after identifying them. (One of the features this was intended to demonstrate was The New Infocom parser's ability to dynamically label objects in the game. Any labels could be put on the cubes, at the player's choice -- although the official InvisiClues hintbook given with the game identified the cubes by such straightforward labels as "the Earth Cube", "the Life Cube", etc., the hintbook also contained lists of more fanciful names given to the cubes by Infocom's programmers and testers. For instance, one tester labelled the Mind Cube "Ohio", since the room it contains is called "No Place", while another named the Fire Cube after her husband.)
Eventually we learn that the magic box also has another function -- the box itself is "mystically linked" to the cubes, so that if the box is left behind in a certain physical location, the cubes can be used to travel to that location using the blorple spell. This is necessary only to solve one puzzle in the game, but the puzzle is crucial and occurs very near the game's end -- discovering this secondary function of the box, which requires the highly counterintuitive action of intentionally leaving the box behind, is widely regarded as one of the hardest puzzles in any Infocom game.
Once the player reaches the end of the game, it transpires that the Shadow intentionally used the cubes in its possession to create the disruption of magic in the world seen at the game's outset. The Shadow engineered this crisis in order to force the player to collect the rest of the cubes on the Shadow's behalf. Once the player has all of them, the Shadow attacks the player, takes the cubes and uses them to construct a hypercube, with the Magic Cube at the center. Placing the cubes in this configuration apparently gives the Shadow the power to alter the very nature of the universe; in this state, the Shadow hopes to merge with the Cube of Magic and therefore control all magic in Zork, becoming an omnipotent god.
There are three possible endings, which all rely on actions involving the Cubes of Foundation (actions the player is given "one chance" to perform by stopping time just before the Shadow's plan is completed). If the player does nothing to stop the Shadow, the Shadow indeed becomes a god, whose first act is to annihilate the player. If the player simply removes the Cube of Magic from the hypercube, the hypercube is now "empty" and the universe is rewritten to be based on "nothing", leading to its nonexistence. If the player removes the Cube of Magic and replaces it with a magical object, the magic in the object sustains the magic in the universe, keeping the universe exactly the same -- which means the Shadow continues to exist, and simply goes back and replaces the Cube of Magic and completes its plans, creating the first ending. If the player removes the Cube of Magic and replaces it with a non-magical object, then the universe is rewritten based on the basic principles contained within that object, *excepting* magic -- the universe thus goes on with magic and all magical beings (including the Shadow) destroyed.
This is the optimal, canonical ending of the game, the event known in Zork history as the Great Change. It is strongly implied that the first sixteen Cubes of Foundation continue to exist when the hypercube disappears (especially given events in Zork Grand Inquisitor), but the Cube of Magic itself is seen to "melt like ice in [the player's] hand" once the universe is rewritten.
In Zork Grand Inquisitor, one Cube of Foundation -- consistently referred to as "the" Cube of Foundation -- plays a major role in the game, as an artifact retrieved from the past through time travel to restore magic to present-day Zork.
It is not known which Cube it is, although the prospect of removing any of the Cubes from the past through time travel creates the possibility of paradox. One obvious possibility is the Cube of Magic, though this seems unlikely, as the Cube in this game displays none of the Cube of Magic's powerful properties, and if the Cube of Magic could simply be brought back into existence through time travel (negating entirely the events of the Great Change) it would seem unnecessary to also use the other artifacts mentioned in the game. A better possibility is the Cube of Mind, since in Zork Grand Inquisitor the Cube is described as having the power of "Middle Magic", which seems to mainly involve mental magic and psychic powers. Of course, it could also be one of the four unknown Cubes from the original Spellbreaker game.
Whichever Cube it is, it was apparently won by Antharia Jack in a Double Fanucci game in his youth and kept as a souvenir, Jack, as was typical, having no idea of the Cube's significance. It seems that the Enchanter's Guild did, however, creating a time tunnel to Jack's casino shortly after he won the Cube specifically so that someday someone could retrieve it and carry out the Guild's emergency plan for restoring magic, as Lucy Flathead does under the player's control in ZGI.
The Cube apparently serves some vital role in channeling or controlling the power stored in the Coconut of Quendor (the Coconut is described as "High Magic" artifact or artifact of creation, while the Cube is described as a "Middle Magic" artifact or artifact of "enlightenment") and returning it to the world through the maxov spell. What becomes of the Cube afterwards is unknown -- it vanishes, presumably "scattered" again as the Cubes were from the Shadow's hypercube.
The Cubes of Foundation fail to show up in any other Infocom or Activision works, though they have been portrayed in various fan works of interactive fiction. For instance, Graham Nelson's well known game Balances, created to demonstrate various dynamic features of the Inform parser, does so by creating an Enchanter-like game that depicts the player character from Spellbreaker retrieving the four unknown cubes from that game.