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[ArchGod]

King Mob:

[aqualung1105]

Here is a bit of speculation from yours truly and Wix on IRC - slightly edited to make it readable:

aqualung: more spec: There must be a reason why Friend was damaged - maybe he was a test version of a new kind of agent...he seems to have more empathic abilities than regular programs. Maybe he was meant to find out about people before they got to be a security risk, and somehow his purpose was deleted from his code, along with the communication systems, so now he is fully functional, but doesn´t know what to do...
His actions are known to the system, and now, when they´re not authorized, the system reverts them </wild spec>

Wix: aqualung: I'm trying to make a connection between the AI man and Aquapolis... perhaps the AI is becoming more "aware" of itself... it's not really damaged, just "growing" in awareness

aqualung: I think so too - maybe different parts of the system follows different paths: Friend is going for empathy, SafeSys is more hostile. The drowning guy may have done something which SafeSys interpreted as a threat, something minor maybe, and it overreacted and killed him, kinda like the AI in "Terminator", which started a nuclear war to keep man from throwing the off switch.

Wix: True. Maybe the worker was requesting a temporary shutdown of SafeSys while he re-wired something...

Boy, I like this thread!
- more to come for sure...

Aqua

[King Mob]

[King Mob]

Okay, here's some wild speculation for you:
Let's give the Oct. 1 picture to Beth and ask her to give to AI Man/Paul; if, as some theories have proposed, he is .bh/Minotaur and is motivated to solve puzzles, why not let him solve the damn thing for us?

[Omnie]

[yeahyeah]

[Atreus]

I know AI man's Name!

Garbage Collector



GC



GARY COLEMAN!

[King Mob]

[yeahyeah]

I met Gary Coleman once, he gve me two t-shirts for UGO which is for 'underground online' if I remember correctly, there was a hacker refererence on the shirt also, so it is quite possible he is indeed a hacker!!

Scary....

[Tobester]

[King Mob]

[yeahyeah]

wish I had a scanner or a digi cam with me..

Okay. .so the Gary Coleman shirt looks like:

White t-shirt..
Gray Fist (left hand) cartoon style..
Over the letters UGO, G is in a circle.

*
|
U(G)O

This is in a black filled circle, which has a thick grey outline/circle around it (approx .5inch)

To the right of this logo, it says:
---- ---- -----
Road Rave
---- ---- -----

And on the back it says:

UGO.COM
UnderGroundOnline

The ugo stuff is wrote in black in white, enclosed in individual black circles, which are there by surrounded by black outline circles..

The G is substantially bigger then the U and O..

G - GC - Gary Coleman

Makes perfect sense to me..

[BrianEnigma]

[Omnie]

Ok, I was gonna post this in the Brutus Files thread over in Puzzles, but then realized that the entire post was pure spec, so... for context, I was referring to how confusing the whole Averys=?Nekodas=?Emersons=?parents of Jesse thing was.

Maybe...someone's wrong? I mean, if all the characters are right, then I have absolutely no idea what's going on. How can the Nekodas, who believe they were the Emersons, and that their son was Jesse Emerson, also be the Averys, whose son is Jesse Avery?

We KNOW that Jesse is Jesse Avery...1) the ID
2) Beth recognized him. She knew his parents well enough to be able to tell

So...maybe the Nekodas are wrong? Or, maybe they are right about being Jesse's parents, because it really seems like they are, but they're wrong about having been the Emersons. That would make my plot-baffled mind happy. And I probably only say that because we know nothing about the Emersons, but... maybe the CD wasn't meant for Ethan? Maybe the Emersons were just family friends with the Averys or something, and then Ryan got in touch with James and told him all about that stuff that happened with the Agent, and it just got out of control.

Hey, I just noticed something that kinda kills the Ryan=James thing. The Ryan note was written on Jan 17, 2003. James "announced his retirement" on January 5th, 2003. Ryan doesn't sound like he's particularly scared or about to go on the run, he's just storing some stuff "for safekeeping." So...the Emersons didn't go missing til later. If they ever did at all...is there any indication that they're even missing?

Also, did we ever figure out who exactly the note was addressed to? It sounds like it's to a family friend, because Ryan casually mentions Sylvie, and mentions that he's told the reader about the Agent encounter, so they must be kind of close. I would posit James, but I just proven that impossible, I think, so I'm just going to pose the question...and go to bed. Ugh, it's late. If I said anything remarkably stupid in this post, that's my excuse. Also, it's random spec, so stupidity is allowed, right?

[Oh, so my actual speculative theory, which I don't think I said, is that Averys-->Nekodas sometime before Jan. 5th, and the Emersons kept doing their own thing, whatever that may have been. Actually, that may be what prompted Ryan to put those things into safekeeping, just in case whatever happened to James happened to him. Maybe he told the bartender dude to give the CD to James if he ever comes in...maybe I should go to bed.]
[Edit] Ok, so the whole, "Look, it's our handwriting!" thing kinda ruins what I was saying. So let's just say I'm still completely baffled and leave it at that.

[out to lunch]

My turn for some Emerson=Avery=Nekoda speculation...

Everything we know about the Emersons is documented in a time frame between 1988 (their marriage) and 12/29/2001 - the date of the agent photos, etc.

The only timeline we have for James and Lynne Avery is that they disappeared in January of this year, 2003.

So here is my wild spec on all this...

Ryan and Sylvie Emerson were the original two. They had a boy named Jesse. Something funky happened in 2001 that forced the system to reprogram all three of their lives. Ryan Emerson becomes James Avery, Sylvi becomes Lynne and for some reason Jesse's first name stays the same. All their background and history was successfully erased by the Garbage Collector - except for the CDs that it did not know about.

Then for about two years everything is fairly cool until, for some reason, it hits the fan again and the system has to go and reprogram everyone again. Except this time there's a problem. Jesse gets away and the Garbage Collector doesn't clean up like he should have. James becomes Ethan, Lynne becomes Dina but Jesse is still Jesse.

So the Nekodas stumble across the CDs and think they are the Emersons, which they are, but they're also the Averys.

Alright, I admit that it is weak, but maybe there's something there...