Recap - artifact555 video solve
In the early days of this blog, some of the solves weren’t documented as cleanly in one post as has become the pattern. In reviewing the solutions to Pangent’s publicly available videos, it was discovered that a few of them could use a newly compiled summary solve post. So here goes the first of those, enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVWfnqiuVXk
Binary title: artifact555
Video begins with a warning about flashing images, and whoo boy, those happen.
There’s lots of shots of the cube, glitching in colors and flashing, and interspersed with possible flashes of Lottie, and some more interesting effects. The sound is also ‘interesting’.
The cube is alive.
There doesn’t appear to be any coded content in the video, but the description has some things worth investigating.
almost-binary in the description, replace the ‘O’s and 'C’s with '0’s and '1’s to get actual binary for:
xV_OQ4CQqE8
This is a YouTube ID: https://youtu.be/xV_OQ4CQqE8 - A video with binary title 'theline’, showing Lottie 'speaking’ but the audio sounds computer-generated and states:
There are some things we as a species weren’t meant to know
This video also contains some pastebin links in the description, more on those later.
Back to the text in the description of 'artifact555’:
imgur bAqfpxr
This is theoriginal MSPA ad which was the trailhead for this ARG
imgur jbUD1v0
This is a nonogram, popular in those days.
Can be solved manually or with tools like http://a.teall.info/nonogram/
Interpret the squares as binary:
011010110111101001110110
011000110110011101110001
011010000110001001110111
011110010111100101110101
011101000101011001101011
011000100110111001100010
011011010110101101110011
011001110111010101100011
011101100110110101101001
011011010110111101111001
011011010111001001100111
011110100111001101110001
011011000110111001100111
011001111111111111111111
kzvcgqhbwyyutVkbnbmksgucvmimoymrgzsqlngg
Vigenere with key 'conscioushumansouls’ (and add spaces):
i like it here it Isnt quiet can you hear the waves
imgur 7Foyrsz
Kcode - read off the RGB values of each square
In decimal they are:
49 53 32 104 111 117 114 115 32 102 114 111 109 32 116 104 101 32 99 101 110 116 101 114 32 111 102 32 116 104 101 32 115 111 117 114 99 101 0
15 hours from the center of the source
xV_OQ4CQqE8 is a YouTube ID leading to: https://youtu.be/xV_OQ4CQqE8
unlisted video with binary title: theline
Contains several Pastebin links in the description:
PB CBiWsY85
https://pastebin.com/CBiWsY85 - hex title: themoth
contains binary text encoded as Vigenere with key 'guineapix’ which decodes to:
I have a friend, let’s call her C.
Let me talk about C for a minute.
The wonderful and terrible thing about C is that she’s a moth drawn to flame.
For a few years now I have supported her in everything she’s done.
She’s reckless. If she were a character in a movie, she’d see an explosion and run toward it while most people are running away.
She’d run into the burning building and inhale the smoke while taking notes on how it affected the building structure.
And she’s probably the one who caused the fire in the first place.
Metaphorically, I mean.
She gets results only because she loves the danger of it. She’ll come up with a solution and write it down without knowing if it’s right or not. She’ll try it a dozen different ways, watch the entire thing fall to pieces in a dozen different, irreplaceably expensive ways. Destroy everything while taking notes on the wreckage.
When she’s done she’ll clean up the mess and she’ll understand the problem on a molecular level, from the inside out. She’ll be standing in the catastrophe she created, with a thousand pages of notes on how to do it right next time.
I believe she’s the greatest genius I’ll ever know.
And she’s a disaster. A walking disasterpiece.
Her mind makes leaps that other minds can’t, because they understand that actions have consequences.
She knows that messes can be cleaned up, and systems rebuilt.
So she plays with fire.
Well, not every mess can be cleaned up. You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.
Now that I’ve typed that I’m not so sure. She could probably figure it out. She’d ruin a lot of tubes of toothpaste in the process.
But hey, toothpaste is cheap.
The Twitter archive is still broken because of her, but I suspect if she hadn’t been fired she’d have fixed it within a few days. And because of her we did figure out how to decrypt the deleted data. It’s a slow, manual process, but it’s all there in some form or another.
I wonder if that was X’s plan all along, somehow. He remembered Sandy Bridge, and figured if there was smoke there there was fire. He followed a trail of clues and now he’s taken everything.
It’s not C’s fault. She did what she always did. She made a mess so that we could learn something.
Maybe something we shouldn’t have been messing with in the first place.
There’s this object, Artifact 555, alias The Cube. I’m not going to ask where it came from or how X’s father got it, because I value my life and my career and I know that questions have consequences.
I’m not going to ask what it is, either. But I don’t have to. C is asking.
What I know is this:
X, because he’s an asshole, sent the three of us photos of this thing.
It’s hard to see and harder to look at but I’d describe it as a glass cubic box with reflective blue matter inside.
When I looked at the photos of this thing, I was filled with a paralyzing fear unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. Afterward I was sick for two days.
Leslie was sick too. Even her cat was sick.
I don’t know how that’s even possible. I don’t want to know how that’s possible.
But then, I’m not a moth drawn to flame.
C was at the store when she saw the photos. Just on her phone, not even on a big monitor.
She fell and hit her head. E had to come and get her. She didn’t walk straight for days.
Now, a normal person’s instinct would be to get the hell away from this thing, and get the hell away from X, who used it as a weapon. Another kind of woman with another kind of mind would have changed her name, left the country, called in an exorcist and dedicated her life to rejecting satan and all his ways.
Instead she signed the world’s worst contract and said she’d be back to work on the second.
Because she’s a moth drawn to flame. She loves the mystery and danger of meddling where she shouldn’t.
I know that right now every cell in her body is screaming out wanting to know what this thing is, even if she has to burn the world down around her to understand it.
Well, that’s just who she is.
X knew that too. He knew that if he shouted “DANGER” at her with a megaphone and police sirens and flashing lights five hundred feet tall, she’d come running toward that kind of danger. She can’t help it.
For years, I’ve supported her in everything she’s done.
I hope I never have to regret that.
PB i1pxP041
https://pastebin.com/i1pxP041 - hex title: gnixob (reversed: boxing)
It’s almost-binary again, replace the 'C’s and'O’s with '1’s and'0’s then reverse, then decode as binary, then Vigenere with key 'argentina’ to get:
Another question.
Let’s say there’s an object. Let’s call it “an object.”
I looked at a few photographs of this object and became violently ill for reasons passing understanding. It was a couple days before I could walk without worry.
The others in my group had a similar reaction.
Here’s the question.
What happens when I see this thing in person?
And work alongside it for a long period of time?
What exactly happens to my sanity?
Happy Boxing Day.
PB sd7MrRX5
https://pastebin.com/sd7MrRX5 - hex title: analog
Contains binary, Vigenered text with key 'argentina’:
Okay, I’m calm now.
The Cube reacts to electrical stimuli.
It even reacts in a predictable and reproducible way, suggesting that data can be imprinted on it for later use. X’s father must have known this. Someone must have run tests, suggesting this could work for data storage, if we could only understand how it works.
Well, we don’t need to understand the Cube. And it doesn’t need to understand us.
We’ve been thinking of this thing as digital, thinking how can we connect to it, like it’s a hard drive.
But it’s not. It’s squishy, it’s meat, it’s liquid, it’s practically a brain.
It’s analog.
Do you understand?
When I was a kid, we had cassette tapes. We had vinyl records.
A vinyl record isn’t made with digital data. Vinyl doesn’t understand and interpret the music, it’s just plastic. And the needle is just a needle. There is no artificial intelligence there. But when a song is playing, you can etch the vibrations of that song onto that dumb plastic, and the needle will react the same way to play it back again.
Magnetic tape is dumb too. It doesn’t need to understand and interpret the signals being sent through it. It just needs to be able to play them back accurately. VHS tapes of movies, cassette tapes of music. Did you ever record a computer program onto a cassette tape, and then play it back? You could just play the sound, all of this whirring and beeping, and your Apple II or Commodore 64 would understand what the tape couldn’t.
The original analog medium is a book. The pages of a book don’t understand the data written on them. But the writer understood, and the reader understands, and that’s enough.
We don’t need to understand the Cube. We don’t access that data by plugging in a cable. We don’t learn its language and it doesn’t learn ours. It’s a book. We write something on it, and then we can read it later.
So. Let’s say I set up a server which reacts to data.
And we test the Cube’s reactions to the same data.
And we test it and test it and change the way we deliver the data to the Cube, until the reaction matches.
We don’t need to speak the Cube’s language.
We just need it to react in the right way when we speak ours.
PB 18E6yhak
https://pastebin.com/18E6yhak - hex title: repair
Contains binary, Vigenere’d text with key 'argentina’
Questions for this Christmas, asked of nobody but myself.
The first question is whether or not data can have a soul.
This is a question with two possible answers, so for the sake of argument let us assume the ridiculous - that the data of a soul can be saved, and that this does not disprove the existence of the soul as a theological concept and construct.
Let us say that data can have a soul.
The second question is, what if that data stream becomes broken and corrupted, in the way that souls also become broken and corrupted?
If we save the data, do we save the soul?
And if so, do we save it in a theological sense or merely on a technical level?
What exactly would we be tampering with here?
It’s four AM. I’m drunk. I should go back to sleep.
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