At first we thought that maybe it was something threatening, or interrogating—arrangements of small cubes in particularly demanding patterns. You get a close look, scan and tunnel it, perhaps, or just look at it, closely, to see what it is. But that was our first mistake: to see what it is. Capable of quantized rotation, we noted, in fine, dark marks over light, broad ones. What are you doing with those implements? it seemed to ask. Nothing fit, sideways, or after a finite number of reflections. Who had ever heard of sticking a spherical peg in a cubic hole. Ideas were proposed, ideas over which we had labored for unmeasured lengths of time, but plans were implemented only for very short whiles. Its questions may have been penetrating, long-winded things, but its answers were shallow cavities filled with wound-up paper scraps. Curt feints of explanation were already written on both sides, in all orientations and colors of ink. When did it get a chance to do all of this penmanship? we asked. When did it study the relevant precursors? What were the relevant precursors? And while we meditated, it reflected: our raised eyebrows and humble smiles painted themselves on its surfaces. We counted the faces, made ticks of varying widths atop other ticks, the widths of which we parametrized consistently. Our makeshift notebooks filled with scrawls made absurd as the thing repeatedly became altogether something that it had never previously been. We were forced to shift our demarcations; pieces that were parts suddenly no longer should have been labeled as such. We forged and destroyed entire vocabularies trying to name the thing and its subdivisions, dodging or setting aside its ever-present problems of dimensionality, and left ourselves with the most specialized and vague of words, like smudge, pleat, and pocket. The only descriptions to which it seemed unanimously in favor were those involving synonyms of hexahedron, so we kept such descriptions close, on the skin or wedged beneath fingernails. Novel thoughts disappeared too quickly for us to leave the thing undiscovered, but the process of discovery felt unscientific, and fruitless despite the fresh succulences we noticed ourselves mouthing.