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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!) » The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!): Puzzles
[INFO/SPEC] Organization anyone?
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leetch11
Boot

Joined: 26 Jul 2004
Posts: 11
Location: Minneapolis, MN

 		Of Backups and Corruption
Ok, so our current line of reasoning suggests that the Queen is a damaged AI and that the Princess is a backup of the same AI that was somehow lost so that the repair program SPDR went about fixing the Queen instead of making a clean install using the Princess.

On another thread, we have the Troy and Odyssian imagery which leads us to the conclusion that Melissa (the Queen) was tricked by a, for lack of a better term, "Space Hitchhiker." Subsequently, Melissa was tricked into doing something (still not clear on what that was...) that betrayed the ship (or worse) into... well, like I said, we're not sure...

My Question is This:
What if the Hitchhiker corrupted Melissa and hid the backup? Then, when the SPDR went about repairing the queen, it was unknowingly repairing a fundamentally corrupt AI... Melissa would therefore be a VERY dangerous virus, and our job would be to help dethrone the queen and promote the princess!

Anyhow, it popped into my head after a couple glasses of Scotch... take what you will...
_________________
Te Occedere Possunt sed te Edere non Possunt Nefas est
(roughly: they can kill you but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier)

PostPosted: Wed Jul 28, 2004 12:33 am
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number8
Veteran

Joined: 26 Jul 2004
Posts: 92
Location: Toronto, Canada

 		As Dana would say: "Too much noise, hard to follow the signal ... "
We have a lot of info coming in. From the subsequent text I think that we can establish that:

The Widow = SPDR = Spider: a routine that starts up by the Queen to repair the Queen. Not an AI but a simple program of sorts. The spider is the one that initially hacked into ilovebees.com, and used the server to as a holding place of the Queen.

The Queen = operator = Melissa: The AI on the ship that crashed. the AI that sent out the Mayday text. At that point it is conscious but not at full power, so it can only communicate using classic literature. After phase 2 however, it awakes and can now form coherent thoughts. From the Operator's Monologue we know that she is still being repaired, but she now has control of the Dana's server. She recalls conversation from the crew before the crash, and it seems that she is quite bitter. From the links puzzle we know that it's true name is Melissa (meaning Operator is a nickname), and that she has a memory of a relationship with the Castaway. She found that memory disgusting BTW. Later on, when Dana was poking around with the server, the Queen found this to be a hostile act and established Dana to be a killer. But since she is trapped in the PC box (the server), she could only take pictures through the webcam. It the the operater's intention now though to Kill Dana before Dana kills her.

The Sleeping Princess: Not too much is known about her at the moment, except that she is hidden from SPDR and the Operator, and that she got hold of the ladybee777 account, which she use to communicate with us. Though the way she do this is to send back reordered text sent to her by us throught the account. Seems friendly to us, and probably a rival of the queen.

The Pious Flea: Again not much is known, except that he is a male and that he was likely the narrator for the Widow's Journey. The clue to this is that he would be the only one that knows of his whereabouts. Interesting thing to note then is that he has been in existence from the very beginning, from the time the ship was destroy.

Dana = Assassin?: Our beloved (and hot, as some people have pointed out) webmaster or ilovebees. A human being whose site has been hijacked by SPDR. After phase 2 she attempted to repair her site one last time, but this was seen as a hostile action from the Operator. Claiming in her blog that she has been seen (thru the webcam) and skinned (harmed?), she decided to drop the whole thing. Unfortunately her life could be in danger as she was marked by the Operator.

the military crew: Actually personnel on the ship, whose coversation was uncovered. Not much is known about them.

the hitchhiker: A person (or non-person) picked up by the ship before it crashed. Melissa seemed to have fellen in love with him, even though he was married. Their relationship seemed to have really thick Odyssian overtones, so it is speculated that their relationship has gone bad at some point.


I hope I didn't miss anyone. This is really just a summary of what we have talked to far. Open to debates of course.

And uh, sorry if the post is too long.
_________________
Drool problem quite interesting Drool

PostPosted: Wed Jul 28, 2004 5:17 am
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Partnerz
Boot

Joined: 26 Jul 2004
Posts: 39

 		It is perfectly possible to assume that the Pious flea has access to the Ladybee777 account due to the fact that the author of the Killer.jpg seems to be not one, but 2 people.

Quote:
Please don't be freaked out

The Widow the Queen are trying to keep me in very bad shape as well
I can sympathize with you

I believe I can help you out, I can apply a construct to protect your

core


This is very likely to be the Princess, who is now awake.
Quote:

In a chamber of the dungeon the Sleeping Princess lived here. Describe

the place

a total mess
such a shambles!


The author now switches to past tense (the princess lived here) Which suggests that the princess is awake. If the author is the Princess then why mention that "the Sleeping Princess lived here", wouldn't it try and say that is where i lived.

By the way, you also missed out the servant, who it seems like the assassin, the queen is afraid of.
_________________
Speculaton is nothing more than believing assumptions. I want facts i tell ya, facts

PostPosted: Wed Jul 28, 2004 6:52 am
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ste
Boot

Joined: 27 Jul 2004
Posts: 52
Partnerz wrote:
You miss several key ideas though. The author of the Killer.jpg uses too different guises. The first definitely seems to be the princess.

The author is speaking in the past tense (the Sleeping Princess lived here) which suggests she is now awake and not their anymore.
But you see the if this is the Princess why talk about yourself as sleeping, when she is clearly awake. Wouldn't it be more logical to use "I" or at least revoe the word "Sleeping". This leads to the idea that it may be the Pious flea speaking aswell as the princess.


I don't think it's going to prove helpful to analyse the semantics of the image-hidden text too much, because that text is reconstructed from what we've emailed.

It appears from the unwieldy way it's written that this second character (who I'll refer to as The Sleeping Princess for argument's sake, but could be The Pious Flea) can only take larger fragments of our emails, not single words.

So when it says,
Quote:
In a chamber of the dungeon the Sleeping Princess lived here.


It's getting "In a chamber of the dungeon" from the fairytale, either directly or (perhaps more likely) because someone emailed the tale to the hotmail account. "The Sleeping Princess lived here" must have come from somewhere else. I'm not sure where, but the point is that that fragment isn't likely to be an exact fit for what it wanted. Maybe the tense is out, maybe it uses the third person, maybe it's simply grammatically unwieldy, but whatever, it means the sentences only contain the essence of what the writer wants to say, don't hold with breaking down.

(If it could take single words, or changes tenses, I think it'd be a lot more coherent. You don't need that big a vocabulary to sound like a human being, and it's going to have received a lot of emails. Indeed, given the freedom to take single words and change tenses, you could probably get by on the fairytale alone, although you'd have to use a lot of metaphors...)

Is anyone trying to track down the source of all the fragments in the killer.jpg answers?

PostPosted: Wed Jul 28, 2004 7:47 am
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krystyn
I Never Tire of My Own Voice


Joined: 26 Sep 2002
Posts: 3651
Location: Is not Chicago

 		Are we also assuming/concluding that all these entities are hanging out on Dana's webserver?

That's really odd, isn't it? All these pissed off, damaged, trapped AI personas ... all on one machine? I'll be very curious to find out how they got there in the first place, and when perhaps they'll be able to branch out to other parts of the internet. (Aug. 10th, then?)

Unless, of course, Dana unplugs the machine. Smile

At any rate, this all smacks of schizophrenia ...

PostPosted: Wed Jul 28, 2004 11:25 am
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Etymologician
Boot

Joined: 23 Jul 2004
Posts: 59
ste wrote:
I don't think it's going to prove helpful to analyse the semantics of the image-hidden text too much, because that text is reconstructed from what we've emailed.


Again, it's not taking phrases solely from our emails (i.e. the Tristram Shandy quote), but I agree that it's probably not wise to read too much into the strict person and tense of the phrases.

PostPosted: Wed Jul 28, 2004 3:49 pm
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firefox
Unfettered

Joined: 28 Jul 2004
Posts: 333

 		partnerz:
It is perfectly possible to assume that the Pious flea has access to the Ladybee777 account due to the fact that the author of the Killer.jpg seems to be not one, but 2 people.

7x7x7 = 343

343 guilty spark, is the evil monitor which escapes at the end of halo (watch credits to end)

could then guilty spark be pious flea?
bent upon eradication of mankind.?

PostPosted: Wed Jul 28, 2004 8:31 pm
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TheDude
Boot

Joined: 27 Jul 2004
Posts: 16

 		well we have to assume that the 3 7s were put there by margaret the owner of the site and not The Pious Flea.... ohnoes 7 posts on the 27th end of the world!!!!1111one1one!

PostPosted: Wed Jul 28, 2004 8:33 pm
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Grimakus
Boot

Joined: 27 Jul 2004
Posts: 11
Location: Dallas

 		Just a bit of rambling first-post insomnia at 4:00am
Pardon if this is off topic. (I do not know exactly where this belongs, this project being so immense, and I being so tired!)

I was puzzling around the meaning of SPDR in relation to bees and hives, and came up with the following, which a search on unfiction failed to pull up:

[SPEC]
System Peril Distributed Reflex might not refer to a spider in relation to hives and bees: SPDR might refer to a swarm.

What is a reflexive action across an entire bee community when faced with the eminant (sp?) demise of a hive? Bees swarm. The workers either swarm out to attack the aggressors or they pack up and leave the hive in the event that the hive has been fully compromised or overcrowded.

I'm not saying that the SPDR /isn't/ a spider in the sense of what the current storyline is telling us, but from the standpoint of the ilovebees.com website, what if SPDR represents a bee swarm? Gah. I get repetitive when I'm tired. Sorry.

[TRIVIA]
An interesting tidbit concerning bees. Worker bees decide upon new queens, and usually, the current queen of the hive will attempt infanticide against any newly emerging brood queens. Also, the broodqueens will kill off any rivals as well as the parent queen in attempt to dominate the hive.

Here's another interesting factoid: The average matriculation of one brood queen from larva to full-fledged queen is about 24 days (if you give said queen about a day of mating time). Has anyone noted how long the website has undergone the countdown to china? Rather, when was the start date of the initial countdown? (I know I read that somewhere...)

Also, how might this reflect upon our Queen and S.P. scenarios?

Just my two wooden nickels,
Grimakus

PostPosted: Thu Jul 29, 2004 5:14 am
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Kallelin
Boot

Joined: 29 Jul 2004
Posts: 16

 		hmm...
I, for one, agree with Partnerz- it would certainly seem that both the flea and the princess have access to the killer pictures, if just because of the two different voices.

It would also appear, because of this, that this might be how they are able to communicate with one another, and it's also possible that because they can both access it, it's kind of an encrypted way of hiding their correspondence in the queen's domain.

I also have to wonder why no one is talking about the Manticore. I have at least two theories on that (which I've searched out pretty far... Am trying to avoid a trout on the first post, but you never know.) So, without further anything, rampant speculation.

Either, because the Queen was in control of all the software on the ship, and so that was her domain/castle as it was referred to, the warped ex-servant of the queen could be a piece of software where the queen is now, trapped in the box. Because the widow would only know a program as the queen's servant, it might interpret software we wrote (like windows or something) that wouldn't let it through as a renegade of the queen's own people. Then, because of some inherent difference in the types of code it might see it with the semblance of a normal program (like the manticore's human head, but the difference lies in the animal-like body). So it had to kill software on the way to get to the queen for repairs. (I am definitely assuming Widow=SPDR=Servant.)

And my infinitely less likely theory is that Dana could possibly be the manticore. Because the widow would only know a human as the soldiers on the queen's ship, someone working against it (as Dana's actions have been seen as an assassination attempt by the queen) might seem a renegade member of the domain. We assume Dana hasn't been killed yet, but this is also a dream, so the things may not yet have occurred... We also see that the SPDR is already repairing the queen, but the queen seemed to think repairs were useless until Dana was killed... Then again, the Bang Bang Bang could certainly be killing the Manticore- Dana is already leaving, no longer interfering with anything on the system.

And yeah, I'm just throwing out ideas. Glad to be here, this is my first Arg and pretty awesome so far.

PostPosted: Thu Jul 29, 2004 10:38 am
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Partnerz
Boot

Joined: 26 Jul 2004
Posts: 39

 		The Queen mentions the the Widow and Servant as 2 different people/subroutines.
_________________
Speculaton is nothing more than believing assumptions. I want facts i tell ya, facts

PostPosted: Thu Jul 29, 2004 10:42 am
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Kallelin
Boot

Joined: 29 Jul 2004
Posts: 16

 		Oops
Sorry, I'm a little disoriented from all the sources... is the servant mentioned in places other than the Operator's Monologue and the story? Because in the story 'The Widow said, "I am the servant of your Queen, and I have walked up out of Hell to prepare this Keep for her return. Let me pass."', so I connected her with servant. And the only place I see the servant mentioned in the monologue is in conjunction with the assassin, in "Seems as if all the 3-sense memories are gone - wiped out by the Assassin or the Servant or pure impact damage - but I still have some of the faintcopy /// backups." I thought that perhaps servant was just a different way of referring to the widow/spider/etc. It also seemed likely to me because I thought maybe the spider's attempts to repair the queen could be somehow damaging the memories.

... Sorry, I seem to be babbling. In short, can someone tell/remind me where the servant is referenced besides the Monologue and the story?

PostPosted: Thu Jul 29, 2004 11:00 am
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Partnerz
Boot

Joined: 26 Jul 2004
Posts: 39

 		I don't think it is mentioned. You see all the charctrs cleverly have capitals letters at the start, which is most likely to show they are charcters. Names are nouns, which always beigin with a capital letter (names i mean)
_________________
Speculaton is nothing more than believing assumptions. I want facts i tell ya, facts

PostPosted: Thu Jul 29, 2004 11:08 am
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Kallelin
Boot

Joined: 29 Jul 2004
Posts: 16

 		Ugh, unfortunate
That's a very good point, especially because of the proximity of the two capitalized names.

That kind of sucks. I guess it's now just my assumption that Widow=SPDR, and Servant is some random entity that I have no clue about so far.

And every time it comes up in this thread, it seems to slip back into the background again. Laughing Maybe we don't have enough information to figure it out yet. Do you have any other ideas for a different alias?

PostPosted: Thu Jul 29, 2004 11:19 am
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Dorkmaster
Unfictologist


Joined: 27 Jul 2004
Posts: 1328
Location: The People's Republic of Dork

 		Here's my latest theory, and I think it's in line with current thinking of the Wiki at large, and I don't credit this to myself, but to the collaborations, and i essentially am once again recapping for clarity:

SPDR=Spider=Widow

Queen=Operator=Melissa

Sleeping Princess(S.P.)=???

Pious Flea = hijacker of ladybee777SPLAThotmail.com, but is reporting to S.P.

Assassin=killer=Dana

And here's where I spec (but this has been brought up before, but this is in agreement:) The Servant is US. We are the servant to the assassin, or Dana... would that not make sense? Why wouldn't the Operator believe we are all one entity? All the email goes to one account (as far as she can tell, right?) So why not be communique between one party to another, right?

PostPosted: Thu Jul 29, 2004 12:59 pm
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