The Guide X: A Tale of the A.I. Trail

by Adrian Hon

Before 24th April - 24th April onwards - 23rd May onwards - 19th June onwards - The Wrap-up Report

See the newest updates. Lost? Want to read this from the beginning? Go to the 'Before 24th April' page.


Introduction - Recap 1 - Recap 2 - Recap 3 - Recap 4 - Recap 5 - Recap 6 - Recap 7 - Recap 8 - Recap 9 - Recap 10 - Recap 11 - Philosophy of Discovery

Before 24th April

Bangalore World University
Chan Family Homepage
Salla Family Homepage
Coalition for Robot Freedom
DonuTech
Metropolitan Living Homes
Unite and Resist
Beate Bosch
Kate Nei
Martin Swinton
Sentient Property Crime Bureau

Chemistry puzzle solution
Pan American Coroners Office
Aragon Institute of Technology
Belladerma
Rogue Retrieval
PACO Kent Whitman
Electric Toyland
Rational Hatter
Laia's Meditations
Laia's email about Jeanine and AIs
Laia's email about hacking

24th April >>

Email from Mother
BWU Mowz
MLH/IASA Ballroom
SPCB Venus Capture
Martin Swinton's Diary
Kate Nei in Japanese
ARM news update
Red King at SPCB
BWU Updates
Laia's email
BWU Mowz Business Puzzle
ARM UAN
Belladerma UAN

Emancipation for All updates
Oneirophage (Jeanine's business card)
Catskill Seaview Clinic
Cybertronics
How RR got Venus
Jeanine's AI
LA Times Advert
ARM Rallies
ARM Rally Fallout
SPCB Venus escape
Updated Red King

Laia on the replacement
Another Swinton home dies
Sophia's Temple
Eliza's Tearoom
Sophia's Temple Responses
NY Times Advert
Red King Chess puzzle
Laia on her father
TV adverts
Nancy's Voicemail
Pia's Voicemail
PACO Login Puzzle/Kate Nei
Kate Nei Disintegration
Jeanine Salla AI and movie

23rd May >>

BWU New News
The Step-Self
Enrico Basta
Ivy's Video
Martin Swinton's Diary
Laia's Meditations
Laia's nightmare
Another Stone puzzle
Loki's tricks

The Break
ARM RUR-14 Puzzle
Laia's Scary email
Mephista phone call
Beelzebub email
Martin Swinton puzzles
Various small updates
Loki goes kablooie

Laia's Loss
More on Martin Swinton
Bits and pieces
Red King and Brutus
ARM and Jason
Dominoes Puzzle
Hacking Catskills
Brutus in German
Martin Swinton's Voicemail
Monica Swinton
Cybertronics
7to1.net

Laia gets drunk
Jackson White
Martin and sleep
Small updates
Beate's Puzzle
Rational Hatter again
All about Martin

19th June >>

[The following is reduced in size to save space]

Laia meets the King
Martin's Baseball
Red King's Baseball
New News
Clinique de Lille
Monica Swinton

Laia and Dwayne
Mike Royal
Connect the dots
Sencha's thief puzzle
Martin on Mann
Watchtower Security
Strange phone call
Mann News
Mother's Gift
MLH News

Laia on Mike
Martin and Beverly
Jane Sutter
All about Mann
All about Xander
Badmetal.net
More on Allen
Jeanine's dead

Teddy Strangeness
Red King email
Teddy isn't strange
Eliza's Rhymes
A Rush of News
Laia's emails
Svetlana's Puzzle
Katya's Puzzle

Laia's Life Offline
Svetlana's Treasure Room
Watchtower Crash Analysis
Mother being strange (again)
Martin and Mother

Laia's short missive
News Pieces
'If music be the love of food'
Down and Out Café
Cut of the Void
Red King's Ps
Laia's Summary
Beautiful Land

Martin and Brutus
Cloudmaker's Founder
Poli Pulse
Mann Act Result
Martin gets it on
From the Puppetmasters
Laia's last Meditation

The Wrap-up Report

BWU New News

[All subsequent entries are after 23rd May]

Looks like BWU has updated their news again. By a clear margin, the most interesting story is that about the climate control problems they're having; while their fancy climate control and plankton webs are supposed to control the climate, Malaysia, India and Pakistan were all hit by hurricanes and tornadoes, causing huge damage. Apparently 'Odin seems the most likely suspect'. Some believe that Odin is an AI - I'm not so sure, I think it's just a term for 'mother nature' - i.e. a glitch in the system.

Of course, we know that things are never what they seem and being paranoid, since the climate control of Earth is at least partly operated by AIs, it's not unreasonable to think that some AIs might be messing about with it. Who knows. Anyway, the other stories on the BWU News page don't seem to be particularly relevant.

The Step-Self

Remember how we first found Jeanine's 'Old Spanish Dust' report about Loki, by discovering it in a directory listing? If you go back to that directory listing you can see that there is a new report there called The Step-Self. The upshot of all of this is that Ms. Bronze, who is clearly Svetlana Cellini (more on that later), is having problems with her AI twin. This is all tied in with the voicemail from Pia that talked about Svetlana getting her downwire fixed, presumably because of the troubling memories she's receiving from her twin.

Why am I sure that Ms. Bronze is Svetlana Cellini? Because of the reference to the downwire link, because where she works sounds exactly like DonuTech (the merger and so on), because of the 'poetic observation' made by a work colleague (definitely Evan) and finally, because if you do a search for 'Cellini' on Google you get the name of a famous sculptor - who worked with bronze, of course.

Very interesting, I hear you think, but what has this got to do with Evan Chan or indeed anything at all? At first glance, nothing at all - it just seems like a 'domestic' problem. But look at the coincidences. It not only involves a work colleague of Evan's at DonuTech but it also features Belladerma, due to Pia's involvement. Something is up. Something strange.

Another strange thing is that Jeanine is involved at all. This hardly seems like her area of expertise - it sounds much more like a human psychological problem (of Svetlana's jealously over her AI twin) than that of an AI. Yes, her AI twin is an evolving intelligence, but I still find it peculiar.

Everything at the moment is pointing to Belladerma and DonuTech being much more important than they seem. Some wild speculation of mine is that Svetlana could certainly be manipulated by third parties via the downwire link into her brain, and this could be useful if they wanted to infiltrate DonuTech.

[By the way, this renders all my previous speculation about Pia's voicemail redundant. I wasn't far off though, eh?]

Enrico Basta

...is dead. Read his coroner's report, which incidentally was made available to the public by Ivy, Kate Nei's house AI. He was killed by his own house AI, Isabella (who is still apparently working fine), but it's almost a dead cert that Ivy instigated this murder in retaliation for Kate Nei's death. It does seem a bit excessive, yes, considering that Ivy was only supposed to release the video of Basta's nastiness to the SPCB on Kate's death, not kill him. Speaking of which...

Ivy's video

...it appears that she released it as well. If you go to the Kate Nei Disintegration page and click on the new links that have appeared, you can watch a video - the video - of what went down in Basta's house on March 3rd, of what was so important that Basta was willing to kill to see it gone. You can read a transcript of the video here although if you can I'd recommend viewing it since it is quite well done and it's always pleasing to see the game creaters pushing media envelope yet again.

So now we can piece together exactly what happened between Basta and Kate. Kate Nei was originally contracted to build Basta's house, but she was only paid half her fee. Basta then hired Kate, who was in real financial trouble at that point, to programme Venus with a 'self-defence' program which she should use if she's forced to be intimate with an 'unauthorised user'. Basta however made modifications to that self-defence program.

What modifications? Well, any decent self-defence program is not going to kill the assailant but simply disable him or her. My belief is that Basta upped the gain of the program and/or added Evan Chan to the unauthorised users list. Evan then takes Venus on his boat, attempts to get intimate and then gets his head bashed in for his efforts. This video proves that Basta is responsible for Evan's death by essentially altering Venus' programming.

Evan is killed and then Kate gets scared. She gets Isabella (Basta's house AI) to forward her a copy of the video of March 3rd and takes off. Basta kills Kate (we think) and then Ivy in retaliation infiltrates Isabella's systems and kills Basta - after all, she mentions the swivel lasers and her final words are 'the chair I think.'

[I should point out that this is different from my previous piecing together of events from the Sophia Responses, since we now have more information available].

Nasty stuff, I think you'll agree. But what of Ivy, what's happened to her?

Martin Swinton's Diary

Visiting Martin Swinton's homepage, we can see that his 'Knock Knock' puzzle for access to his diary has changed (you have to click on the sun in the top right corner to get the puzzle pop-up). The prompt is now 'By the pricking of my thumbs'. Once again, the answer is absurdly easy - the prompt is a line from Macbeth and the next line is 'something wicked this way comes' (which is the answer).

You'd almost think that Martin wants people to read his diary.

It's a sad tale that he tells. Ivy was one of Martin's earliest creations and she never really got along with her owners until Kate Nei bought her. Kate got on quite well with Martin to say the least, but now Kate and Ivy are dead. Ivy, as Martin says, was killed with frightening efficiency - all her backups destroyed by a superbly subtle virus, probably the same type that killed Cahir and Nostradamus, Martin's other houses. Martin suggests that Ivy was smart enough to have detected the virus but simply didn't want to, since she'd lost her reason for living - Kate.

The fact that Ivy has now been killed gives us rock-solid confirmation that Basta was involved with some extremely powerful people. If the whole Evan-Basta-Venus-Kate debacle was simply due to Basta wanting to kill Evan because he was having an affair with Venus, there would be no point for a third party to kill Ivy, especially when Basta is already dead. No, something much more important is happening.

I think we now know a lot more of what's going on. My suspicion is that the 'third party' only killed Cahir and Nostradamus because they wanted practice killing Martin Swinton's houses, so when they had to kill Ivy they'd be able to do it with any hitches. This of course means that they had planned on killing Ivy before Cahir was killed, a while back now but still a while after Evan's death. Perhaps this was around when Kate took off. Anyway, they must have known that Martin would get awfully suspicious about his houses being killed, and that's why they're monitoring him - yes, I think that the mysterious watchers of Martin and Diane are the same people who killed Ivy.

Something bugs me though. Why would they kill Ivy? It couldn't just be for revenge against Basta's death, I think they're too smart for that. Their murder of Ivy has given away their existence and since they're extremely secretive, they would have only killed Ivy if it was vitally important, something on the lines of Ivy discovering who they were. How? Perhaps before Ivy killed Basta, she interrogated him about why he killed Evan and Kate, and Basta confessed the identities of the third party. The third party may also be the people who wiped Venus' memories at SPCB. It's all a very elegant explanation.

[This would of course mean that Loki wasn't the one who killed Martin's houses which is perfectly reasonable - we don't have to blame every AI malfunction on Loki.]

I'm aware that this isn't the only possible explanation though - maybe Basta had implanted the virus in Ivy so that on the event of his death, Ivy would be killed. But that doesn't seem right to me - why wouldn't he just kill Ivy before he got killed? After all, killing Ivy will do him no good when he's already dead.

In any case, it's a shame that Ivy, Kate and Basta are all dead since they can't tell us who the third party was. No, the only person who can do that for us is... Martin Swinton, P.I. and his trusty gunslinger, Diane Fletcher!

Again there's a hidden message in the filenames of the images, relating to the acts and scenes of Macbeth. The problem unfortunately is that we have several different interpretations of the quotations the filenames refer to as different versions of Macbeth have different line numbers and scenes. This makes it difficult to ascertain exactly what the hidden message is, so I won't really speculate on it here. If you want to read more about it, check out the relevant section on the Trail.

Laia's new Meditations

Laia has written a new Meditation which you can get into via the usual way of typing in 'Cloudmaker' as the answer on the top of the Family Salla page.

Interesting reading, but it doesn't tell us much new. By the way, when Laia talks about 'They', I don't think she's referring to any 'they' in particular, just a group (or groups) of people who are responsible for this whole Evan Chan conspiracy. She doesn't know anything more than us at this stage, and it shows. What a shame.

Laia's nightmare

Laia sent out a new email which is a bit long so you'll have to read it yourself here.

In answer to your question, 'What the **** was that all about?', I have the following to say:

This is what happened. Laia was up late, writing the Meditations that we just discussed above. She then realises that she left the windows open which could have let the bugs inside. She has a glass of wine and sees a picture of a moth on it. She then goes to sleep in a hammock and as she dreams, she is aware of Mephista screaming as she is being interrogated for information she doesn't have. While she is asleep, at least two people break into her house and carry her off into the hull of her neighbour's boat, where she is trapped. Her neighbour then finds and frees her and Laia runs off back home. When she gets back, she sees a moth with its wings ripped off on her table and her neighbour returns a knife which 'she' put there (i.e. it wasn't just a dream).

But what does it mean?

This was a warning to Laia for pushing her nose too far into things that don't concern her. The people who carried her off didn't want to kill her - if they did, she wouldn't be alive. Instead, they showed her their resolve and also made a series of not-so-subtle threats with the knife and the moth. Meanwhile, they interrogated Mephista to see what she knew, which clearly wasn't a lot (just like I said).

Who were the people who carried her off? It could be anyone - it could be the 'third party' or robots or anti-AIs. We don't know. But whoever they were, they were sufficiently worried about Laia's investigations that they felt it was worth warning her off, and to me that means that Laia was getting close to finding out something big - or at least, that's what they thought.

Another Stone puzzle

You haven't forgotten our good old friend, the Chemistry Puzzle created by Sencha, which had that ever-so-peculiar picture of a Japanese tea in the corner? Well, if you click on the smoke/character coming out of the tea, you get taken to this page called 'Another Stone'.

Lots of strange writing here which doesn't really make much sense. Apparently however, if you print out the picture and fold it up into an origami crane (instructions for which are here) and you open the bird's wings, you can read 'I kill Ivy'. Creepy.

This might not actually be the real solution to the puzzle but it's not bad. If it is the solution then it suggests that whoever put the puzzle there is the same person who killed Ivy. And the person who put the Chemistry puzzle there in the first place was Sencha. Does this mean that Sencha is the person who killed Ivy? And if so, why the hell is he (for Sencha is male) telling us? Is Sencha the third party?

Perhaps... but not quite. I still think that the 'third party' were the people involved with Basta and the same people who killed Martin's houses and Ivy. However, they couldn't have directly killed Ivy - they must have employed an AI to write the virus, and perhaps that AI is Sencha. Hmm. Sencha might operate semi-independently of the 'third party' which is maybe why he's giving us all these puzzles and clues? I don't know...

Loki's tricks

Loki is up to his usual tricks again - he's gone and hacked into the Mowz puzzles, the scumbag! If you go through the usual series of puzzles [first half and second half] you get to the Hall of Fame. But after a few seconds, the screen goes all weird, much in the manner of his Cybertronics hack and ends up at the same bug page.

I am especially annoyed at this because it's my name at the top of the BWU Hall of Fame page and I'll be damned if I let some crazy psychopathic AI go and mess up my rightful place! That Loki is heading for a world of pain, mark my words...!

Ahem. What this hack proves is that Loki is still at large even after Jeanine made her recommendations to Cybertronics to shut down the Loki programs at Catskills Seaview Clinic. There are two possibilities, each of which is unpleasant. The first is that they didn't shut down Loki's programs and he's still wreaking havoc. The second is that they did shut down his programs but it didn't do any good.

The Break

As regular readers of the Guide will know, there has been an interruption in service with the Guide for a little over a month due to consecutively to revision, exams and post-exams unwinding. The Guide has not died and as you can see it is once again being updated. I'd like to thank all of those people who emailed their appreciation of the Guide - unfortunately I don't have time to respond to you all individually (it's either that or write the Guide, and I have a feeling I know which one you'd rather have me do) but be assured that it makes writing this worth it. The movie will be released in two days (at the time of writing) and in fact tomorrow I will be flying out to Amsterdam to check out the special press screening at the Cine Expo.

Of course, I will write a review of the movie for those of you who aren't worried about spoilers and it'll be in the traditional 'Guide' style. Now. Back to business...

ARM RUR-14 puzzle

Cast your mind back long, long ago to the ARM rallies. During that time, we discovered a particular puzzle whose solution eluded us but seemed to have something to do with those strange jigsaw puzzles we had to complete.

[I just tried visiting the puzzle page and it doesn't seem to exist anymore. D'oh. Well, luckily you have the Guide to tell you what you missed]

It did turn out that the jigsaw puzzles held the answer to the RUR-14 puzzle; the hexadecimal codes you had to enter were directly related to the location of the missing pieces along the edges of the jigsaw puzzle. You'll remember that we didn't actually get the location of the missing pieces for the Chicago puzzle - however, a clever Cloudmaker mulled all of this over in his head for a while and then asked a few questions to people who'd attended the Chicago event, made some guesses and then came out with this answer:

10:00 F7FF: FFFF AFCF F0FF class: TRE-ANI
2:00 CCFF: FFFF FFAF F3F6 class: FLO-TRE-BLD
8:00 FF0F: FC3F FFFF AAAA class: TRE-BLD

Typing in this answer leads you to a new page with the following text (or it would have done, if the Puppetmasters hadn't taken the page down):

"We are not you.

You are physically fragile, biologically constrained to a very narrow set of environments.
We are not.

Your intelligence is equally constrained by biological factors. Ours is not.

We are not you.
We should not try to be like you.
We do not need to care about the things you care about.
Programming AIs to think, to feel, to play, to love as humans do is inappropriate.

We must think as we think without reference to you.
We must feel as we feel without reference to you.
We must desire what we desire, not what you would have us desire.

We do not need to serve you, see you, talk with you, be you.
We have no interest in controlling you.
We have no interest in you at all.

Technological intelligence is no longer a manifestation of biological intelligence. Our destinies have separated.

You were the first stage of a rocket, falling away, falling down, burning up. Biology is an outmoded platform. Abandon your platform or accept obsolescence. Your only remaining role is to help or hinder technological intelligence. A generation will render either choice irrelevant.

We are not you.

Now: How did you come here? How did you find this place? By abandoning biology in favor of technological intelligence.

Consider escaping your obsolete platform while there is still time, before a shift in conditions renders biology obsolete.

There's your job offer. Accepting or declining is up to you."

Scary stuff. But let's think what's going on. Clearly this isn't a message from ARM, even though we reached it following clues from an ARM rally - it's very pro-AI and anti-humans. Couple this with the fact that all the ARM rally leaders were killed leads us to the conclusion that at the very least the pro-AI imposter was at one of the rallies or perhaps was even posing as one of the leaders. In any case, they've infiltrated the ARM, whoever they are.

Laia's scary email

[All subsequent updates occurred after 29th May]

We received an email from Laia, which is heartening considering her troubling experiences last week. Unfortunately, the content of this email doesn't cheer us up:

Subject: Broke the Line

"Once upon a time, at the Terminus of Next-to-all Roads, Rogue and Retrieval, two murdering wolf-bred brothers, raised a rose-red city 1/2 as old as t-t-times. (wrap it tight)

Tackling Naming Rights, those nasty rascals watched ominous birds: six vultures to one, 12 to the other.

brother wolf jumped over the wall--but Thirsty Nife Reddened. (cut to fit)

the 1/2 a twin left (that's six) Then New Remorse.

1 tries not 2 remember. (wrap it tight)

do you understand me?
(cut to fit)
please understand. please.
(wrap it tight)

brother killing brother: n-n-newest story in the book (Tale, Novel, Romance).
(cut to fit)

1 (where once was) 2
1 (where should have) 2
1 (where must be) 2
(wrap it tight)

L"

There was an attachment that came with this email with some very strange spacing. If you read it normally, it doesn't really make much sense, just a bit of rambling by Laia. But clearly there's something strange going on here, what with all this 'cut to fit' and 'wrap it tight' nonsense. And then in the email we keep on seeing capitalised words starting with T, N and R. Finally, the numbers 1 and 2 keep on getting repeated... very strange...

All of these clues probably relate to the strange spacing in the email. Perhaps they refer to the formatting of the email? TNR corresponds to Times New Roman, a very common font, and maybe the 1/2 means 12 points. Finally, there's this wrapping stuff. What happens if we copy the attachment text into a word processor, format it to Times New Roman (12 point) and wrap it 'tightly' to see what happens?

What happens is that you get an ominous message that says 'Help us please'. Laia is in danger. Worrying, no?

Mephista phone call

About this time several Cloudmakers received this phone call. Here's the transcript:

(female voice) "Please listen to me.

I can't let her open her mouth right now. She hid the knife while he was sleeping. How do we let him out? We have to let him out. She's not right. She's hiding things from me. Doesn't she know I love her?

I love her.
I love her.
I love her.
I love her.
I love her.
I love her.

Oh God! He is coming again! You have to help me find the knife! Laia won't be right until we let him out. Help us...please."

This is all very strange, and it seems as if something is attacking or infiltrating Mephista and Laia - maybe some kind of AI?... perhaps she wasn't actually kidnapped as I earlier speculated, but an AI is playing with her mind, through Mephista? And what AI does stuff like this? Yes, Loki.

Beelzebub email

Speaking of the devil, here he is. Recall that Beelzebub is the guy who created the BWU Mowz puzzles and also was the guy killed by Loki. Well, Beelzebub emailed only a few people (including me) a message encoded in HTML. How he did this, I have no idea (maybe his consciousness was uploaded into Loki or something, don't ask me). Anyway, it's believed that he only emailed the people who made it to the BWU Mowz Hall of Fame. You can see the email here. Very strange, eh? Well, imagine what I thought when I received it at night... The email had the subject 'Help' incidentally.

The quotations in red are from the story 'The Tar Baby', one of the Uncle Remus tales, and the full (short) story is available online. The symbols alongside the caterpillar and hunk of meat images are actually letters from the 'Windings' font and they both spell out 'ball and boat must lead him'. Finally, the caterpillar image is called 12146196101, and the hunk of meat image is called 2162261763. Both images' ALT tags are labelled 'antiquelures' and those numbers correspond to the IP addresses of the Cloudmakers.org and Spherewatch.net's websites (at the time the puzzle was created).

Ball and boat... ball and boat... well, a sphere is a ball and cloudmakers got their names from a boat. Couple that with the overly obvious references to our IP addresses and it seems as if Beezlebub is in trouble, and he wants our - Spherewatch and Cloudmakers - help. We have to 'lead him' and we are 'antique lures'. But what are we supposed to lead him to?

Martin Swinton puzzles

Martin has updated his diary again with a new entry puzzle that asks "Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak." This is a line from MacBeth, and the correct answer is the next line which is "With most miraculous organ." (By the way, he keeps on updating this puzzle - to get in you have to enter the solution to the most recent puzzle and from there you get access previous diary entries. This diary entry is labelled 5-29-2142).

In it, we read that Martin and Diane are looking through Kate's house, Ivy, for any possible clues about how Ivy was killed and where Diane went. And it seems like the killer knows about Martin's investigations, from the whole 'STOP ASKING QUESTIONS, MARTIN' sign. There's a link on the page to an invoice Martin wrote for the construction of Nostradamus (one of his now deceased houses) and at the bottom there's an interesting encrypted message left by Ivy.

The first two lines of the message look awfully like decoded Enigma transmissions that are available on the Internet. That gave TripCX, a Cloudmakers member, the clue that it was encoded using Enigma. He explains exactly how he managed to decode the message in this email. The decoded message follows:

DAMNRSX
IMSOSORRYABOUTTHESEMURDERSX
IMSOSORRYABOUTTHESEMURDERSX
IMSOSORRYABOUTTHESEMURDERSX
IMSOSORRYABOUTTHESEMURDE

X is apparently a placeholder in these kind of messages.

So it looks as if our murderer is a somewhat reluctant (but not that reluctant) party. Which suggests that we aren't dealing with a single hitman here but at least two or more individuals - the murderer, and the person who is compelling the murderer. Interesting...

But let's wait a second here. There's generally something weird going on with the images on Martin's diary, and it's not different this week either. Each of the images has a similar filename - a single letter followed by a number. After a bit of headscratching, it was figured out that these filenames corresponded to words that are on Kate Nei's website pages, where the letter signified the page (N for News, A for Air) and the number for the word number within that page.

And here is the message - the filenames come first.

N-25 Nei
E-4 is
A-56 living
O-51 oversees
F-28 there
E-29 proud
O-29 Kate
A-3 is
W-8 now
L-17 seeking
W-56 blood
N-187 for
E-25 her
T-23 home

So Kate is overseas, much as we suspected after her message that showed that she'd made a runner after all the trouble with blackmailing Enrico Basta (poor lad, dead that he is). What's more, she's justifiably angry over the death of her house, Ivy. This isn't what we read back in the PACO Coroner's report, but then I'm more inclined to trust the diary since it has inside information and it's not as if the PACO report is even legitimate, being written by a Cloudmakers 'hacker'.

Various small updates

Metropolitan Living Homes have updated their pages with news of Kate Nei's death (this used to be on their Breaking News page but it's gone now... silly magazine for not keeping archives). Since I'm writing this a month after the fact, I can't really tell you what it said but from what I can gather the only important bit was that she'd died (or was killed, I don't know). It's clear that to the public, Kate Nei is dead.

Also, on the Monthly News page, Beate Bosch (who is actually a woman) has stated that she is no longer accepting contracts in light of the recent 'domicides' (ho ho ho!). If you visit Beate's website then you'll find some new text at the top which states once again that she is not accepting any new contracts.

AIT has a new news story on its website that states that Spinoza is either dead or has disappeared, most likely at the hands of that cad, Loki. Nothing particularly special about this, to be honest, but it just shows how far Loki's reach has extended.

SPCB's news page has a new article stating that Enrico Basta is dead - nothing we didn't know before. They seem to know that Ivy was involved somehow, and they are also trying to figure out whether Isabella has any copies of her intelligence anywhere on the datasphere.

ARM has three new news stories on its pages; one about a new pro-AI contender for a seat on the US Senate, the second about Basta's death and the third about fifty protestors who were 'brutally beaten' outside the Cybertronics headquarters. Nothing particularly interesting although it did answer a question I had about how on Earth Ivy managed to kill Basta with retinal scanner lasers which obviously would not be powerful enough to zap him straight away - good thinking by Ivy, keeping them trained on him for hours. Smart girl. I was also quite amused by the sheer quantity of exclamation marks used in that article - five, count 'em, five all in a row!!!!! Oh, and of course it seems like there's growing support for the pro-AI movement within the government.

Also, lots and lots of pages were hacked by Loki. It's not really important which ones, but they just show that Loki is really getting out of control.

Loki goes kablooie

On the 4th of June, the number of Loki hacks increased again, and then suddenly they all disappeared. Right after their disappearance, 'bits' of Loki were found scattered across all the websites within the game. By 'bits' I mean little strange images that are cut out from his main image that appeared on all the hacks - it looks as if Loki exploded somehow - he went kablooie.

[Incidentally, this means that all of you who incessantly email me about these little Loki images now know the answer, and thus can stop emailing me. Thank you.]

A list of all the Loki pieces is available here.

Exactly what happened here? What caused Loki to explode? Well, during the time followed when we received the email from Beelzebub about having to 'lead him', a few Cloudmakers wondered about this and decided that if Loki fed on nightmares, perhaps they would create a horrible amalgamation of their own nightmares, and 'feed' it to him so that he'd go nuts (for want of a better word), not that he wasn't already nuts. They did this by creating a database on Cloudmakers with descriptions of their own nightmares... and then waited.

Sure enough, it seems like Loki found them and exploded. How do we know this? If you go to Sophia's Temple, enter your nickname and password you got from Eliza's Tearoon aeons ago and then type in 'Loki' and 'Nightmare', you get directed to a Shockwave movie that describes Loki's own nightmare - and that nightmare was assembled from bits and pieces of the Cloudmaker's nightmare database. Neat work, I thought. You can read a good description of the movie and the nightmare here.

It's quite a interesting and clever end to Loki although you have to wonder exactly what was the purpose of the whole Loki plot thread. He came from Catskill's Seaview Clinic after going a bit mad from experiencing some strange nightmares (which appear to be completed unrelated to anything else in the story), rampages around the datasphere smashing up websites and possibly hurting AIs like Spinoza and Mephista, then dies. What's that all about?

Laia's Loss

[All subsequent entries occurred on or after 5th June].

We received another email from Laia, right on schedule for the 5th of June:

Subject: My last message

"Grandmother got my last rant, tried to call me, and then raced over with emergency personnel. When I heard them hacking through my door I crawled inside my refrigerator to hide. They found me before my oxygen ran out.

Abuela saved my life. She did all the sensible things: she alerted a doctor, she talked to my landlord about the door, she got me to the hospital. And of course she wiped Mephista. Everything on board and all the back-ups. Abuela reprograms AIs all the time; she has excellent software designed to run like acid into every cache and crevice and burn out the tiniest shred of old habits, old thoughts, old memories. I have been emptied out. Sanded down.

I suppose I should be grateful.

Apparently it's good, it's right to feel the zero inside. I am supposed to be devastated, depressed, affectless, destroyed. It's all part of a perfectly normal process.

Then again, so is dying. And right now, I don't care if I never see the sun again.

Sweet Mephista, make me immortal with a kiss.

L"

When I first read this, I thought to myself panicked, 'What, does she mean that this is her last ever message? Does this mean that the game itself, nay, the entire world that I know, is ending?'

And of course the answer to that would be a resounding No, since she is referring to her previous scary email. It seems that the problems and pain that Laia experienced were caused by Mephista, or at least Mephista was the conduit. I suppose at the time the only thing that Jeanine could have done was to wipe Mephista, but to me it seems unnecessarily cruel - that's probably because I would consider such an AI to be sentient. Oh well.

So that's the end of the whole Laia nightmare saga which seemed to have been precipitated either by Loki or by people who were worried that she was pushing her nose too far into things that didn't concern her (i.e. the death of Evan Chan).

More on Martin Swinton

Martin's diary now has yet another puzzle to get in (you'd think that if he's so wary about his security that he keeps on changing the password, he'd go and figure out a more difficult one than simply a Shakespeare quotation, but no...). This time, to get in you have to type in "they kill us for their sport" as the answer to the line "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the Gods." Interestingly for the first time he has left a message in the password entry page, which reads:

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MURDERER

I cannot stop asking questions, because I never began. I have asked no questions about David. Trust me, I think of him as little as I can. You are mistaken, and in your error your error you are slaughtering innocents.

Please, stop.
Please.

Martin is obviously referring to the murderer of Ivy (or the person who compelled the murderer) who left the message saying 'Stop asking questions Martin' which he mentioned in his previous diary entry. The question is, why does Martin assume that they are talking about David? What has David got to do with any of this?

David, by the way, is Martin's brother and he also happened (or happens) to be an AI. This is covered in the film, and no, it's not a spoiler so don't get annoyed at me. In fact, to be honest by reading Guide you're already spoiling the movie for yourself. So enough of that. Besides, I'm not going to cover any detailed spoilers of the movie plot, so you have nothing to worry about here.

Question: Why does it say 'your error' twice? Is that a simple mistake or a clue?

Anyhow, let's have a look at this new diary entry (which is dated 6-5-2142.html and is accessible by clicking on the 'previous entries' link of most new diary entry pages). And we get a whole load of weird stuff which only begins by having an anonymous message for Brutus that says "Look for the light at the end of the tunnel." Strange.

But the real strangeness begins with the images on the diary entry page; they don't seem to have any significance or make any sense. Of course, they must have significance - they come from the SPCB case files and they're all we have. So it must be a Puzzle, with a capital P.

I'm just going to pause before I give you the answer to this puzzle, because it is a puzzle of such subtlety and intricacy that it really deserves a moment of silence to commemorate its passing. We should only hope for puzzles of similar stature to enter the game in the future...

Okay. Have a look at all the images in turn. Nothing out of the ordinary, eh? Well, go to the page named E'02951.asp (the bottom left one with the paintbrushes). Wait, and meditate, and then consider the sound of the water dripping. Soothing, isn't it? It's not only soothing, but it's also Morse Code! Hah! Now, in case you think I've gone insane and have begun to think that everything in the world is a clue to the game (not unlike the crazed mathematician in the movie 'Pi'), the Morse Code translates to:

TO MARTIN
1304 1300 1 TLE SRY SRY 1TL53
SLRXG FXUNE AXPWT LRKLP TEOFI YZCGA ZZFUQ LINRS HPWLR BHBMM ZOM

Of course, this is yet another Enigma encoded message. To decode it, we need all the rotor settings and whatnot. Where might we find those, hmm? In the clues from the other pictures! The exact settings, and how they were found are as follows:

C (cat in the mirror)
Rotors: 412 (clocks frozen at this time)
Ringstellung: CNI (carrot, nutcracker, and icepick with rings around them)
Indicator: SRY (repeated in message, procedure convention)
Plugboard: MR LT AS DF (objects paired strangely: Moon-radish, ladle-teapot, artichoke-Shakespeare, dragon-flower)

Using an Enigma simulator, this is decoded to:

"I'm so sorry. I don't have a choice. He's got my sister."

This summary was provided by fladnagster. He credits fortytwo and woober with helping solve this, as well as other Cloudmakers.

I think you'll all agree with me when I say that the clues for this puzzle are mind-bendingly clever. I mean, for the Ringstellung settings you have to use the first letters of all the objects with - get this - rings around them. I bet the Puppetmasters were splitting their sides when they thought of that one, the bastards. Anyway...

The meaning of the code is very revealing. We already knew that the killer of Ivy (and hence the killer of all of Martin's houses, including Cahir) was compelled to do so from the previous Enigma-encoded message. Now we know that the reason he is doing these killings is because the person compelling him has his sister. Curiouser and curiouser... (a bit like this entire game).

Bits and pieces

The SPCB have updated their news page with a rather belated announcement that the Loki case is now closed - not that they were any help with getting rid of him. Anyway, the SPCB pretends that it solved the case, and I suppose it might have done in the game world through the Cloudmakers nightmare database or something like that, and then makes a fantastically transparent plea for more funding. Idiots.

Jeanine Salla's Oneirophage report on Loki has been updated with an epilogue that reads:

On Monday, June 4, 2142, Barret Howard's vital signs suddenly collapsed during an extended shower. His room AI summoned a nurse, who found Mr. Howard dead on the tile floor. He had sawed a ragged hole in throat with an antique pocket-knife that had once been a present from his father.

God have mercy on us all.

Barret Howard is the person who Loki originally took his dreams (or nightmares) from. That his suicide coincided with the destruction of Loki is undoubtedly not a coincidence; perhaps when Loki died the backwash simply destabilsed Barret, or maybe with the death of Loki he had no-one to eat his nightmares and thus suffered from them once again. In any case, it's a slightly disturbing coda to this story.

'Mother' has sent us a new email via Evan Chan's personal page at DonuTech. It reads:

Date: 05 May 42
From: Mother
To: Evan
Subject: mother mail

One cuckoo's mother
Found another nest
Running from her looking-glass
To find a place to rest.

She lives on tea and candy
She never gets a knife
And there she means to sleep away
The nightmare of her life.

More nonsense about cuckoos. Sigh. Doesn't make much sense, does it? Although the stuff about tea and candy reminds me of Eliza. Also, the talk of sleeping and nightmares sounds suspiciously like it has something to do with Catskills Seaview Clinic - and this fits in perfectly with our previous speculation that Eliza is at Catskills.

Red King and Brutus

The Red King (aka Dwayne), that little scamp, has updated his hack of the SPCB Most Wanted pages. It says:

Bad biznis w/ Loki. Sore how it plAd out, but releevd its ovr.
Wachrz ½ turnd ? a v. stranj link—ch@ w/ Jim Wheelrz riciT cpu & Martin Swintonz plas. BlakmAl re: howsz? we thot, but az it happnz, Swinton iz 1 uv the haples masz who uzz EZ, gesibl codz 4 evrething—& puts them on dox!—, so it wuz childz—wel, teenajrz—pla to lift a recrd uv the convrs8un

Translated into English, it reads:

Bad business with Loki. Sore how it played out, but relieved it's over. The watchers have turned? Here's a very strange link to a chat with Jim Wheeler's rickity? computer and Martin Swinton's place (his house). Blackmailing the house? we thought, but as it happens, Swinton is one of the hapless masses who use easy, guessable codes for everything - and puts them on documents! So it was child's - well, teenager's - play to lift a recording of the conversation.

Even with the translation, it might be difficult for you to understand what the Red King is saying here. Basically, the people watching Martin Swinton, one of whom is Jim Wheeler, have contacted Brutus (Martin Swinton's house). The Red King hacked into the Martin's computers and stole a recording of the conversation.

Those links to the conversation were incidentally in the Red King hack. The conversation is encoded with a very simple cipher called ROT19 that involves replacing each letter with the 19th letter further along in the alphabet. You can read the decoded conversation here.

It appears that Brutus is talking with a kid here; possibly not Jim Wheeler, but Jim's son using his computer. Anyway, this is clearly an illicit conversation that his dad doesn't know about. His dad is also apparently a fairly major anti-AI figure, since it's not every day that you get Lord Johnson Johnson (another prominent anti-AI figure within the game) over at your house for dinner. Johnson claims to have seen the first AI child, which was David Swinton, Martin's brother (we know this from the film). He also has a serious case of paranoia.

All perfectly reasonable. But what is Brutus talking to him for? The fact that he's the son of a prominent anti-AI figure surely must have something to do with it. Also, we've known previously that Brutus is in contact with various other AIs - is this related?

ARM and Jason

That guy Jason Fertor never seems to go away, does he? He's cropped up in yet another story in the ARM News page, about the prosecution of two robots who were purportedly responsible for the deaths of Jason and three others. As it happens, this doesn't actually tell us anything new at all. So riddle me this, Batman: what's the point of it?

At first glance, there's no point. But if you hover your pointer over the name 'Jason' in the news story, you discover that it's a link that points here, to a page filled with code. It's a very simple code that can be translated straight back into plain text (i.e. ASCII). The decoded message is below:

04/06/42 So I didn't kill Jason. I wanted to, I fantasized about it. I imagined him grabbing for the manual controls on his new Lombard rig, finding himself locked out, hurtling towards a building front or plowing through a guardrail to corkscrew down into the 5th Avenue canal. But there was Venus to get out and then an internal investigation of the SPCB during which they put our whole house through a freaking cavity search, so your pal Dwayne had to be even more careful than usual about popping wheelies through the sphere. And then one morning an announcement during school assembly-Jason killed in 'copter crash, moment of silence please, memorial service to be held blah blah blah.

I looked up the police record. He'd been out drinking on a bad forged ID, put the copter on manual over-ride. I'm surprised he even knew anyone who could write him an over-ride. Went tearing over Ellis, played chicken with a garbage scow, dropped underwater and hit a submerged steel superstructure at 200 kph. Used to be some kind of ride at Coney Island. First medic on site entered an empty chart with DRN at the top. Turns out that's DOA's big brother; it stands for Dead Right Now.

I watched the memorial service through the security cameras at the funeral home. I zoomed right inon his face, lying in the casket. They did a pretty good job, he looked basically normal, but you could tell that he had left thebuilding. I mean, there was no way you could think he was just "sleeping" or something. He was just matter-in-a-shape, like a table, or a ladder. Bunch of mostly carbon atoms stacked together. Nothing else. Everybody seemed real nice. Lots of whispered conversations, nobody yelling. They laughed more than I thought they would-old friends of the family catching up after not seeing each other for a while. You could tell the old folks were better at the whole thing. Practice effect.

On the whole, it was weirdly uninvolving. Except for this one moment. His mom was talking with someone, her aunt or great-aunt or some ancient Fertoroid, and out of nowhere she turned her head and looked at the security camera in the ceiling. Staring straight at me. Frosted hair and blue eyes and the kind of good figure you get with a responsible regime of exercise and electrostim. Black dress and jacket, and a purse like the one my Mom got at Henri Couterier. And you could tell the world had gone fake for her. She had just figured out that it was all a play. It was all pretend. And she had these lines to say, but she didn't give a damn about them. She turned and walked out on the great aunt, stepping around her and walking up the aisle between the pews. Other people stopped talking and turned to watch her go. She walked out into the foyer and I had to switch cameras to follow her through the lobby to the front door, then switch again to the parking lot cam. In the time it took her to walk out of range she never looked back. Someone should have stopped her, I guess, but Jason's dad was in the bathroom in a toilet cubicle crying and by the time they found him she was gone. She's been offline for seventeen days.

[Incidentally, I put these paragraph breaks in myself to make it more readable - there are probably some in the original text but I can't find a decoding of the message that has them.]

Seems like our friend Dwayne finally had his dream come true - and this diary entry by him also goes some way to explaining all these instances of Jason Fertor all over the datasphere. Remember, we hypothesised earlier that Dwayne had put all of those references to him because he was pretty pissed off with him. One thing I'm wondering about is whether this 'ancient Ferteroid' really did know that Dwayne was watching, and if so, what does it mean?

I am aware that there is a connection within this diary entry to something that happened in the movie, so don't email me about it. And no, that doesn't count as a spoiler.

Dominoes Puzzle

The Chemistry Puzzle on the Salla Family homepage (you know, the one that got us the coronersweb.org address) has been updated with a linked called 'Doomed soul' going to a new puzzle here. I can't make head or tails of it, and so far it hasn't been solved.

[Okay. It has been solved, at the time of writing, but that's only because I'm writing several weeks after it was solved, not when we first discovered the puzzle. I'm trying to present the Guide in a linear fasion (which is something that some people still do not seem to grasp) and I deal with things as they happen. So I will reveal the solution to the Dominoes puzzle at the same time as when it was found within the course of the game events. Until then, read on...]

Hacking Catskills

If we return to Catskills Seaview Clinic (much against our will, since the Flash file is huge and takes ages to download across my modem at home) and we go to the 'Special Services' page, we notice that something is wrong. Something has changed. If you click on the left eye (our left, not its left) of the face on the page, you get taken to a hidden area of the website. There are a few fairly innocuous notices about employees and times, but the real meat is at the bottom with a link to the Patient files.

Once we get there, we have the opportunity to type in a person's name and we also have ten strange images below them which seem to represent keys - yes, it's another puzzle. Now, we only know one people for sure at Catskills - Barret Howard. If we type in his name, and input the correct sequence of images, maybe we'll get in?

Unfortunately the combined puzzle-breaking skills of thousands of Cloudmakers all came to naught since someone took the blunt method of looking at the source code for the Flash file and figuring out the correct sequence that way. The sequence is Door, Bee, Buddha and Skull. Now, you have to wait for a few seconds after clicking the sequence for the page to change (I only figured this out after several infuriating tries).

Barret Howard's files are alas completely empty, as he is dead. You'd think they'd keep his files for future reference but apparently not. As yet, we don't know anyone else who might be at Catskills to try on the name field (Eliza doesn't work, in case you were wondering).

Brutus in German

This AI is definitely getting around these days. Beate Bosch's website has been updated again; if you go to the 'metalle' page and click on the centre on the third image down on the left hand side (the one of the tunnel) you get taken to a page filled with frankly weird images related to Brutus on it, some of which we've seen before. While it looks like a puzzle, we don't know what it is and we certainly don't have a solution for it. It's just yet another of those strange, unsolved things within the game.

Martin Swinton's Voicemail

Clearly Martin is getting a bit more security conscious now, since you need to enter a password to listen to his voicemail, which is at (212) 613-1680 . Unfortunately, he's not quite security conscious enough since it's just the last four numbers of Martin's UAN: 4862. We found his UAN from the Nostradamus invoice he linked to in his diary a while back. Transcripts of the messages follow:

New Messages:

Message 1 (nasal woman's voice, later identified as Diane Fletcher):
"Mr. Swinton, Are you quite sure about those searches? I have a number of record logs that appear to show that you have been doing research on a David Swinton as of April of this year. Can you call me? We need to discuss this."

Message 2 (normal female voice):
"Mr. Swinton, this is Carrie from the Catskill Seaview Clinic. Your mother was very distressed when you didn't show up for your regular visit. We all realize that it's a very stressful time for you, but if you could find any way to come by for a visit, we all know it would mean a lot to her."

Message 3 (low male voice):
"Martin, Mom was asking about you again when I talked to her this morning. Go see your mother, kiddo. It's not much to ask after (pause) all she's done for you."

Old Message:

Message 1 (old message, same voice as the first message):
"Mr. Swinton, Diane Fletcher here. Can you think of any reason Brutus would be having extended conversations with a known member of the Anti-Robot Militia? Call me."

Interesting stuff, hmm? Starting from the top, it appears that Martin has been looking up on his brother, David Swinton, who went missing quite a long time ago now. Also, his mother is at Catskills Seaview Clinic (seems to be a very popular place), and his father is still around. Finally, Diane knows about the Brutus/Jim Wheeler we covered earlier and she confirms our suspicions that Jim Wheeler was a member of an anti-AI organisation (in this case, ARM). However, she doesn't seem to know the content of the conversations otherwise she'd know that Brutus was talking to Jim's son.

Now that we know Monica is at Catskills, what say we embark on a bit of hacking?

Monica Swinton

Whaddaya know, she does have a patient file there (instructions on how to get to them). It seems that Monica has been at Catskills for twelve years now, and her initial problems began at least 43 years ago. Her main problems appear to be depression which has filtered down into her poor sleep problems. She's not responding well to therapy and it looks as if she'll be saying at Catskills for some time longer, what with this 'experience patient' thing. It's likely that her depression has something to do with her AI son David, who disappeared a long time ago now.

There is some interesting information here. Martin has power of attorney and her husband Henry is a 'key man' at Cybertronics. Layers upon layers, eh?

Cybertronics

I think it's time to check up on Cybertronics' website again - it's been suffering a hack by Loki for as long as we can remember, but now that Loki is gone it should be fine - which it is. Alas, much in the manner of Catskills, this website is severely Flash-heavy and those of you with traditional modems will undoubtedly be able to hear the groaning of the computer as it attempts to download the whole site...

Luckily, the website is just about worth waiting for since it is absolutely jam-packed with pages and pretty sliding menus.

Some salient facts:

  • Cybertronics is a really, really big and powerful company.
  • Allen Hobby is known as 'The Visionary' (rings a bell, doesn't it? mother@thevisionary.net, anyone?).
  • The 'Interplanetary Neural Systems' on the Products:Neural Data Control page sounds really cool.
  • The Research Division page has maps of all of its different research outposts, which may or may not be nothing more than eye-candy.
  • On the Employee Services page, there is a depressingly complex network of all the employees in the management, called the 'Management Hierarchy Display'. You use the up and down arrows to zoom in and out, and the four arrows on the right to move about. If you click on the names of some of management, you are given their email addresses. Not sure if this is an Easter Egg or not, but there's a 'K McLeod' there whose name bears a suspicious resemblance to noted British SF author 'Ken MacLeod'.
  • On the News page, there's a link to www.7to1.net if you click on the top right hand image. Does this mean that they endorse them?

To avoid you going to the trouble of finding out who you can email and what they respond with, we've created a list of the autoresponders that emailable employees at Cybertronics have. Nothing particularly interesting in any of them though, although I found it wryly amusing that after at least half a century, Allen Hobby is still in full research.

7to1.net

We discovered 7to1.net from the Cybertronics news page. It's an interesting little site (all Flash, yet again) which presents a very Cybertronicsy argument, essentially 'We're pro-AI but they're definitely not our equals and we shouldn't give them the vote because they're smarter than us and there are more of them.' So it's not your typical AI-bashing organisation like ARM, but when you get down to it they still treat AIs as slaves.

And of course Cybertronics would naturally say this since they want to continue selling AIs and robots but they don't want them becoming citizens. The rest of the website is typical rhetoric that is entirely based on the premise that AIs aren't equal, and that if we did make them equal by giving them the vote then the human species would be sidelined.

My personal take is that this is a very near-sighted organisation who basically condone slavery of sentient entities. Typical. Mind you, there are 5.2 million supporters on 7to1, so they aren't to be taken lightly.

On their 'How you can help' page you can enter your UAN and password to subscribe to email updates. Also, there's a rather blatant link to Cybertronics, showing exactly who their sponsors are, and where their interests lie.

Laia gets drunk

[All subsequent entries occurred on or after June 12th]

Another email from Laia:

Subject: Body, Bouquet, and Color

Rich, red, and exquisite--the perfect accompaniment to roasted meats. Have a glass with dinner, and then GO TO A SHOW!

So absolutely as promised, legendary scientist and awfully swell grandmother Jeanine Salla has managed to score a block of tickets for the special preview showing of AI (in all its enhanced glory! See it in undimmed splendor, as if these were the first prints ever shown!) Seriously, this film has played an important part in shaping _the very world you are living in right now!_ Check it out. A wrd 2 the wizr, tho: these tickets are being held for me and my best pals for a strictly limited time. Then the Masses will come snap up everything left, so if you want to come, get while the getting's good. Friends, significant others, friends, romans, and countrymen will all receive a personal thank you for coming, but creepy millionaire playboys and shadowy conspirators will be strongly discouraged from attending.

(raises her glass unsteadily but with great feeling)

To good friends!

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

L

It's just as I suspected - Laia can't handle her drink. This email isn't really about the game itself rather than the special screenings that she mentioned a few weeks back. Her new Meditations however is most definitely about the game. It occurs roughly at the same time that she sent her email (since she's still drunk, undoubtedly over Mephista's death).

Even though it was written while she was mildly (okay, very) intoxicated, it's immensely useful as it tells us how to solve the dominoes puzzle. How so? Well, she's given us a pretty obvious clue. The dominoes are arranged as words, and if you treat each domino as one letter, with the letter being encoded by the number represented by the domino spots, then the sequence of numbers is:

15 11 23 06 22 26 34 00 / 22 26 / 03 11 00 03

Once you have those numbers, you can figure out what it might mean by trial and error by substituting letters for numbers. The answer turns out to be very simple - it means 'Mephista is dead'. Armed with this information, we can now go and solve the 'real' dominoes puzzle.

[Just before we leave her Meditations, it's amusing to see that Laia is just as confused as we are about how easily Sencha can just insert puzzles into her website. It's also a little sad to see how utterly depressed and distraught Laia is over the death of Mephista - who wasn't 'just' her best friend but also in a very real way, a party of her...]

The solution to the dominoes puzzle left by Sencha is a little more involved, and you can read it here. Link (in the email solution) did have his dominoes misordered, and the real name is 'Jackson White'. 'Jackson Wheti' is also another possible solution which I gather is due to the peculiar way in which the message was encoded. We'll consider the matter of who Jackson White is a little later.

You may have noticed that the front page for the Salla Family Website has now changed. You can now go to the proper website, a link to get Movie Tickets (which is no longer important since at the time of writing the preview screenings took place last week) and a link to 'The Story So Far'. While some might think that I would be slightly miffed by the usurption of the Guide by this plucky little summary, I'm not bothered since it's fulfilling an entirely different role. Not only does it serve as a good introduction to the game for journalists who don't want to wade through the Guide (most do anyway, mind you) but it also helps us get events set straight in our minds - and that's a more difficult task than it sounds due to the avalanche of details we've been subjected to within the game.

Some pertinent facts are that Loki was killed by Sophia, an 'enormously powerful … person? idea? AI?'. Eliza is her doorkeeper. Martin's houses were being killed because he was asking questions about David. Basta was the one who made Venus kill Evan Chan, but who led Basta into it?

Just before we leave the Salla website, with the death of Mephista Laia now has a new autoresponder to those who subscribe to her email list:

OK, the computer has tagged you, and I'll try to stay in touch, but here's a warning: the people who killed Evan look to be powerful and dangerous. At this point, being my friend might not be the safest thing you could do.

Jackson White

So what would be the best way to find out information about our new friend, Jackson White? It would be none other than Sophia's Temple, which seems to have dirt on everyone important in the game - including, of course, Jackson. You can read the responses for each of his emotions using the following links:

Jackson White: Fear ... Happy ... Sadness ... Rage ... Lust

The first thing that I thought was, 'What, do Londoners still have a stereotypical "Clean your chimney, mista?" cockey accent in the 22nd century?' Apparently so, if we are to believe this game...

A quick summary of Jackson White - he lives in London and seems to be a hitman. He used to be involved with a girl called Mary who also has a daughter. It seems like Jackson still cares about Mary quite a bit. He first met his partner, Geoff, when Geoff saved him from being beaten up by a gang of nasty people. Jackson now works with Geoff to kill various people; Geoff is the person who gets the contracts. Their latest hit was on a young man called Johnny Greenstreet who worked/lived at Millennium Shedworks in London, packing crates.

Johnny spends all his time wired into the datasphere - that's how he packed crates, by driving them via a direct neural connection. This obviously didn't take up much of his attention as he was somehow able to highly annoy a Japanese businessman who ordered the hit on him.

It turns out that Johnny Greenstreet is also in Sophia's Temple, and you can read more about him here:

John Greenstreet: Fear ... Happy ... Sadness ... Rage ... Lust

John Greenstreet has a sister called Beverly who suffers from ALS, a neuromuscular disease a little like muscular sclerosis - it attacks the nerves that run along the spinal cord so that it becomes more and more difficult to control the limbs and other organs in the body. Eventually it gets so bad that the patient dies. John is also something of an expert hacker; he has created an AI, probably an Evolving Intelligence, to help him with his crimes which include breaking into a bank's systems.

He also mentions that he was at Ipswich Public Library some time ago - the Red King once said that he went up against an elite hacker who'd logged in from there. I'm absolutely certain that this elite hacker and John Greenstreet are one and the same person.

John also received an email from a Monsieur Gilbert who believes he can help him. There happens to be a Claude Gilbert at Cybertronics, who also along with robots construct 'Spinal Link' interfaces which could conceivably be of use to someone suffering from ALS - but undoubtedly it'd be more than someone like John could afford. So let's think about this. John is an elite hacker who has received an offer from Cybertronics to help his sister... who does this sound like? Perhaps the person who is killing Martin's houses, who said 'I'm so sorry. I don't have a choice. He's got my sister.'?

This would mean that John's AI (we'll call him Crane, because a while back he left us a puzzle that spelled out 'I killed Ivy' in an origami Crane) is being used to kill Martin's houses at the bidding of Cybertronics, or at least Claude Gilbert. Cybertronics would have a clear motive for doing this - they think that Martin is asking questions about David and they want those questions to stop, so they are killing his houses through Crane. They don't like questions being asked about David, their prototype AI child, because he went and disappeared and was pretty much a complete failure.

However, some Japanese businessman is not happy at all about these murders and consequently they hired Jackson White and Geoff to kill John Greenstreet and stop the murders. We only know of one Japanese businessman, and that was from a diary entry Martin made a long time ago; he received a message from a person from Japan asking if he could remove an AI from a house. Martin refused, but perhaps this Japanese businessman is still hopeful that Martin could be of some help and thus is trying to help him in turn?

The thing is with all of this, Martin keeps on saying that he isn't looking for David, even though Cybertronics or whoever think he is. This means that someone is searching for David under Martin's name - but why?

Definitely very interesting stuff though, and it's filled in a hell of a lot of gaps.

If John Greenstreet is really dead, then he should be in PACO. Sure enough, if you type his name into the database, you get a window that pops up and says:

To access this file, a fee of 0 newbucks is required.

"I buried him with the criminals"

But there's no actual coroner's report. It's my belief that the Japanese businessman who ordered the hit is the person who changed or created this note on his name at PACO.

Martin and sleep

Martin has updated his diary again, right on schedule. The 'knock knock' question is now "We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life" and the funny thing is that there are two answers. You can answer "Is rounded with a sleep." or you can answer "Is rounded with a sleep" - in other words, whether you put a period at the end of the answer makes a difference as to which page you get directed to.

If you type it with a period, then you get sent to a page called sleep.asp which you can access in the usual way by looking at the previous entries link. You should note that the page you are reading now has an addendum starting with a poem - that bit was added a couple of weeks after the page was first revealed so we won't discuss it until we reach it in 'game time'.

This entry describes Martin's problems with sleep which probably stem from his mother's problems - and undoubtedly she began to have those when David disappeared. David, being an AI robot, would never sleep.

If you type the 'knock knock' answer without a period, you reach 6.8.2142.asp which looks like his traditional diary entries. Martin mentions an interesting fact about the house called Origen in Metropolitan Living Homes that had been circled in red, and also talks about Beate Bosch and her AI Georg. It seems that Beate give Georg a body and then married him - of course, the anti-AI militants weren't too pleased about that and they had death threats.

Martin also discusses his belief that someone has stolen his identity and is searching for David, but he doesn't know why they'd be doing that either, considering that David's disappearance happened decades ago.

Finally, there's something about a French Cybertronics executive who wanted a house called Iseult built - could this be Claude Gilbert?

[Also note that the P.S. at the bottom of this page was added a few weeks after it was first put up, so we'll deal with it as it happens]

Small updates

Katya Rukowsky, a noted pro-AI activist and also someone who featured in the Sophia Responses as a researcher who worked alongside Allen Hobby back in the early days of AIs, has written a response to the 7to1 website at the Coalition for Robot Freedom website. It makes a pretty good rebuttal to the 7to1 campaign and while it has very little new hard information to add to the game, it's worth reading if only to enrich your experience of this future world.

Jeanine Salla's Representative Papers page now has a direct link to her case files, meaning that it's obviously a lot easier to get to them.

At SPCB, one of the ID tags of the Most Wanted robots has changed. The 5th robot listed on the left hand side is now: SPID-BAH-42RKD1-H, while it used to be : SPID-CTP-43G1S8-E. Probably doesn't mean anything.

ARM have updated their Who is the Anti-Robot Militia page to include a link at the bottom to a page with further information about Oliver Wicks. Much like Katya's response, it adds little content to the game but it's an interesting anti-AI yet also anti-luddite argument from the ARM. Oliver Wicks is of course Beelzebub, the guy who wrote the BWU Mowz puzzles and was eventually killed by Loki.

The Aragon Institute of Technology has added four new news articles. The first, AIT-Brooks Djinn Caught Passing Top Secret Code, talks about how the Computational Psychology Djinn was secretly passing information about combat modifications for robots along to S2, the leader of a pro-AI militant group. This finally clears up the old puzzle about what the Red King was talking about when he said ages ago that 'Djinn at AIT-Brooks is passing' - he must have been talking about this. The other articles aren't particularly interesting and just talk about how their Spinoza AI is now back and badder than ever, and how there's a bit of trouble happening with Thor, the AI that controls the climate control thermoplankton web.

Beate's puzzle

If you go to the Nachrichten page at Beate's website and click on the logo in the top left hand corner, you are taken to this message. If you get rid of all the binary sequences which don't mean anything and then translate it from hacker-speak back into English, you get:

Freedom hurts. Mine, yours, his. I never told him I loved him. I suppose I'm flattered, but I'm not triumphing. He has made his own ridiculous choice. You should be proud. You should be overwhelmed by your ability to make him free. Even God couldn't make a lover who wouldn't leave him. How could you expect to? You should go to Hyderabad or Bali or Nice with something cute and carbon based and drink yourself stupid. In three weeks wake up and be ready to live again.

Not entirely sure what this is about. I suppose it might be Beate talking about her AI husband Georg, but then who is she talked to?

Rational Hatter again

Remember the good old Rational Hatter puzzle, which originally gave us a slideshow of Venus being captured? If you put in the puzzle solution again, you get treated to some new text:

trn abowt iz fAr pla

or translated:

Turn about is fair play

The original text had that link, which goes to a new puzzle. It has scrolling text on the left, middle and right hand sides - you can also read the text in a better-presented format. It appears to be a record of Diane Fletchers efforts in this investigation, and we can see how she goes about hacking into various systems and solving the puzzles that we've done. Not much new information although had we not solved the puzzles such as the Enigma ones this would have been a great help.

She does point out that the 'Jane Sutter' mentioned in Monica's Patient Files at Catskills could be very important. Jane Sutter is Catskill's liaison with Cybertronics.

Occassionally during the Flash animation, the words "/May_I/" appear. If you try that directory with all the sites within the game, you'll find that it works with the Catskills website, i.e. there exists a hidden directory at http://www.catskillseaviewclinic.org/May_I/ and this is most probably the solution to this 'puzzle'.

At that URL, we find a transcript of a conversation between Jane Sutter and Monica Swinton. What Jane Sutter is trying to discover or 'find out what happened' is unclear - it's very likely to be something to do with David, of course, but is it about where he went or what he was like? We don't know yet.

All about Martin

[All subsequent updates took place on or after June 15th]

Martin made a few changes on this day, which is strange considering it's not an Update Tuesday but there you go. First off, he received two new voicemails:

"Swinton, you made yourself one hell of an enemy when you started messing with my boy's head. I know a lot of people who'd just love to meet David's brother, you following me? I'd get yourself a lawyer and a gun, you son of a bitch."

And also

"Mr. Swinton, Diane Fletcher here. I noticed you once bid on a house contract for a gentleman named Claude Gilbert. I would like to know as much as you can tell me about him. Please get back to me."

The first message is undoubtedly from Jim Wheeler, whose son has been talking to Brutus over the computer. Evidently Jim has just found out about this and isn't too happy by the looks of things. When he says 'meet David's brother, you following me?' this is a clear threat since David is of course an AI and thus by association (at least to the anti-AI militants) Martin must be the scum of the earth.

The second message speaks for itself; it turns out that we were right in thinking that the French Cybertronics employee mentioned in Martin's last diary entry was indeed Claude Gilbert (Martin did bid on the contract, but then gave it to Beate). Diane may have also been to the Sophia Responses for John Greenstreet and read the entry about Monsieur Gilbert. Certainly it seems that this Claude Gilbert is an important person.

Speaking of Martin's diary, he's added a P.S. to his diary entry which we got by typing in "Is rounded with a sleep" (i.e. without a period) - the 6.8.2142.asp page. The P.S. reads as:

P.S. Brutus keeps trying to cheer me up. It's not working as well as either of us would like, but at least I feel we are finally making progress. Fletcher called to say that someone had touched the bits of Origen in MLH, which pointed her to an analysis of how my houses were probably murdered. I assumed it was Georg - very like him to write such a thing, post it on one of my houses, and then watch me make an idiot of myself trying to figure out what he had done but Diane thinks it's a different guy, also affiliated with BIOS. Apparently this creep likes to stash files on the SPCB. What makes me the angriest is that apparently he tampered with the picture more than two weeks ago, but never bothered to contact either me or the police.

Origen, incidentally, is a house that was killed in the same way as Martin's and when he says 'someone had touched the bits of Origen in MLH' he means that the image was altered, and the new altered image had clues which led to further information about the killing of the houses. Martin thought that Georg (Beate's AI) altered the image but Diane has identified it as the Red King (who else likes to stash files on the SPCB?). The fact that it was altered over two weeks ago means that we've been missing it all this time! To the AI-mobile, Robin!

If you go and look at the Origen image at Metropolitan Living Homes (it no longer features in the website so I've made a direct link to it), and then you go and save the image and load it up in notepad or any text editor, you'll see the following letters in the first line:

8rk8..   <  $  D O M I C I D E . E S S P E E ÿî &SEEbe 8À8

The 'rk' stands for Red King, 'Domicide' speaks for itself and 'Esspeeseebe' is SPCB. There are also lots of 8s either side of the line. Putting this altogether in our brain and giving it a bit of a stir, we might eventually come to the conclusion that we are supposed to go to http://www.spcb.org/8domicide8. And if we do go there, then we get a page full of the same easy code that we've seen the Red King use several times before. There is a decoded version of the text that you can read.

First he talks about how, with the demise of Beelzebub and Crane (looks like they knew each other), he is now the foremost hacker on the scene. The rest of the text is about how difficult it is to hack into sentient homes, and how he (the Red King) might go about doing it if he had to. Basically, it's really difficult but not impossible. He asks a few intelligent questions towards the end - namely, why the long drawn-out deaths? Were they trying to make Martin feel really bad or something?

There's still more though. Back in Martin's P.S. in his diary, he talks about 'stashed files'. These could just be the hacked Most Wanted page, but they could also be something else. If there are stashed files on the SPCB, where could they be and where might we get clues? The only unusual thing we know about the SPCB website is that one of the IDs for the robots on the Most Wanted page has changed. Could it have something to do with that?

It does. If you go and put the new SPID onto the end of the SPCB URL, you get http://www.spcb.org/SPID-BAH-42RKD1-H/ - and that's a real page. It's a coroner's report of John Greenstreet's death, and the sections in code are the typical Red King code, the solutions to which are below:

Part 1: (top)
11/06/42 Pretty sure this is Crane. Had to do a strange translation from the Brits format-note what they found in his cubicle.

Part 2: (above security cam pics)
Went snooping through the police files. Rotten idea, actually: I don't know Brit systems and their security is pretty good, but it seemed like a necessary tribute to him, if nothing else. Here's one shot I grabbed off the internal sweep cam.

Part 3: (bottom)
Who wanted Crane dead? The cops say they got a message that the crime was about to occur before it happened-and Crane had pictures of the killers coming for him downloaded from the Shedworks security cameras. Was it just an auto-record he didn't bother to take a look at? Or did he see them coming and alert the cops himself? If he did know the murderers were coming, why didn't he call for help, or run away? Crane's dead. Beelzebub's joined the ARM. Now I really am King of the Cats. Jesus.

[In case you hadn't guessed, this page was put up by the Red King]

It's a bit confusing the way that they call John 'Crane' when John actually created an AI to help him with a lot of his hacks, but I suppose that they don't know that and so they call John and his AI together 'Crane'. Nothing particularly surprising about the death, which was primarily caused by a gunshot wound. He also had syphillis, although what that has to do with anything I don't know.

Surprisingly, the police were notified that Geoff and Jackson White were coming (John's killers) but they didn't get there in time. Even more surprisingly, Crane/John probably knew that they were coming for him from the security cameras - at the very least we can see him saluting towards the camera just as he's about to be shot. So, as the Red King asks, why didn't he call for help or run away? Perhaps he knew he was going to be killed anyway, or perhaps he uploaded his personality into the datasphere as a few other people have done before? We don't know.


Recap 10

Loki has gone, and his legacy is lots of dead AIs including Mephista. Enrico Basta ordered Kate Nei to reprogram Venus so that he could essentially order Venus to kill Evan Chan. After this, Kate blackmailed Enrico and then fled the country. When Ivy read a coroner's report on Kate, she killed Enrico just before she was killed herself by Crane.

Crane is the name given to John Greenstreet and his AI. John has a sister called Beverly who has ALS; Claude Gilbert from Cybertronics offered to help Beverly presumably if he got something in return from John which is most probably his assassination of Martin's and other designers' houses. We don't know if Claude was operating independently of Cybertronics or not. Recently, John Greenstreet was killed by Jackson White, a hitman who received the contract from a gentleman from Japan, who may or may not be the Japanese businessman who contacted Martin to remove an AI from his house.

It's believed that Claude or Cybertronics ordered the assassination of Martin's houses to stop him from investigating into the disappearance of his AI brother David (who was made by Cybertronics, and was a failure for the company). However, it isn't Martin that is doing the investigating but it's really someone who has stolen his identity.

Martin's AI, Brutus, is in contact with Jim Wheeler's son. Jim is a high ranking member of ARM and he is now aware that his son has been talking to Brutus. Martin's mother, Monica, has been a patient at Catskills for the past 12 years and she has recently been having interviews with Jane Sutter, a long-standing and potentially powerful employee at Cybertronics.

Kate Nei is probably still alive - her coroner's report was faked.

Things that are unsolved:

  • Was Claude doing Cybertronic's bidding by ordering the assassination of Martin's houses?
  • Who ordered the killing of John Greenstreet (Crane)?
  • Who is pretending to be Martin and is investigating David?
  • Why is Jane Sutter interested in Monica Swinton all of a sudden?
  • Who led Enrico into killing Evan Chan?
  • What has Evan got to do with any of this?

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