OpenUru - User contributions [en]

Obduction ARG

2013-11-18T19:58:25Z

Ccstat: typo fixes and slight rewordings

= Obduction Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Progress =

In late August, Cyan Worlds, Inc. began releasing hints and clues to what would later be revealed to be their new game project, Obduction. Prior to the Kickstarter campaign, several images were teased, some in encrypted form. These images were mostly screenshots from the then-unreleased Kickstarter trailer and included letters from the name Obduction, hinting at the title. 

During the Kickstarter campaign, Cyan released clues that led through a puzzle trail to several websites. Broadly, clues in the kickstarter video led to hiredark.com, which in turn led to the site obduct.me. The sites hunrath.com and cyan.com/welcome were also found in connection with these clues. These two segments of the ARG were discussed extensively in the [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28 Kickstarter thread] on the Cyan forums.
 

= Pre-Kickstarter =
Beginning in September, 2013, Cyan employee Eric A Anderson (edoublea in the forums) posted several images related to the upcoming kickstarter campaign, some of which contained hidden information. While mysterious at the time, the images are now easily recognized as elements or screenshots from the kickstarter video. 

On September 10, Eric [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151380233143078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posted] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page. He later [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=546#p546 replied] in the forums that nothing is hidden in this first image. 

A [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151391065353078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 second image] on facebook was accompanied by the comment “Unbounded in its ken…” which is a quote from a Robert Gambol poem. Eric subsequently [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=528#p528 posted] an extended quote on the forums along with the clues “Maybe there are more levels to this than you know,” with the letters in “levels” fading to light grey, and “…maybe you need to make an adjustment to your thinking.” Upon adjusting the levels with image editing software, the obduction logo and a line of text [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=537#p537 become visible]. The text reads “736F6F64” which is ASCII for “soon.” 

A [https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151393080463078&id=9225241363 third image] is accompanied by the comment, "...and each step will be made in the wink of an eye," which is from ''The Wizard of Oz''.
edoublea then [http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/1mk5wk/cyan_dropping_new_image_hints/ posts] on Reddit: "A wild clue has appeared! http://imgur.com/7KujlVh Enjoy. ;}" The wingdings in the word bubble translate to “NO!” making the image a rebus for steganograph (STEGAsaurus+NO+GRAPH). The other wingdings translate to “walking shark” which turns out to be a reference to mobilefish.com, which has an [http://www.mobilefish.com/services/steganography/steganography.php online steganography tool].
Processing the third image with no password using the mobilefish site yields [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=632#p632 an image of a seed] with the words, "Prepate to be scattered." Eric confirms that “prepate” is a typo on his part.
 

On Sep 28, Eric (@LemonLime) posted in Cyan Chat, "x6yoZIW Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains." The initial string [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=845#p845 leads to] an image: http://imgur.com/x6yoZIW, and the text is a quote from ''The Road'' by Cormac McCarthy. When no progress was made, Eric [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=914#p914 provided] a link to another steganography tool. After numerous unsuccessful attempts by players to decrypt using various passwords, Eric found that the site was broken and giving php errors. He provided the password (“mazes” from an extended version of the Cormac McCarthy quote) and a [http://imgur.com/PR0LeZP link to the embedded image].
 

Eric then posted in Cyan Chat, "/a/JJNoN I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along." This again points to [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=928#p928 an image] (at http://imgur.com/a/JJNoN). The quote is from ''Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'' by Annie Dillard. An extended version of the quote contains the word “imperfections,” which is the password necessary to decrypt using the mobilefish site. The [http://i.imgur.com/zCDTvtZ.jpg embedded image] is a Magic Eye puzzle in which several letters are visible. Pieced together, the letters form "ODUCTiN."
[http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=947#p947 Remembering] a comment by Rand at Mysterium 2009 about a potential project called Abduction, players [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=989#p989 soon found] an [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1052#p1052 image] with the word "Obduction" on the DRC site. Searching for obduction led to a [http://www.reddit.com/r/Obduction/comments/1odh0k/you_guys_waste_no_time/ Reddit post] by Eric containing a final image link: http://i.imgur.com/oRTaRx3.jpg.
 

Players quickly discovered the [http://obductiongame.com/ Obduction website] and [https://twitter.com/obduction Obduction Twitter account].
= Kickstarter Campaign =
== Kickstarter Video ==

During the Kickstarter video for the game, three words are displayed.

* 3:20 - yellowbrick
* 3:23 - firelight
* 4:05 - germinate

When these words are typed into posts at the Cyan forums, the ("swear-word") filter changes the words to:

* yellowbrick: is.gd
* firelight: odu
* germinate: tol

This was found to be a short URL link: http://is.gd/odutol

The shortlink led to a YouTube video with the title ''4/3 π r3'', uploaded by user ''Chester C''.

The title of the video is the formula for finding the volume of a sphere. The video is three seconds long, cycling through images of different round or spherical objects. The audio of the video (a series of high-pitched beeping sounds) was found to contain a [http://www.texturu.org/share/images/cyan-qr.jpg QR Code] leading to the site http://hiredark.com.

== Hiredark ==
The site hiredark.com simulates the appearance of a Linux/Unix shell (terminal) running a count-down timer. The timer is scripted in (dynamic) PHP, which generates a Javascript script. The units of the timer appear to be milliseconds, and the timer itself appears to be counting down to January 6, 2014. In addition, the script is coded to display the message "You do not have sufficient permission to cancel this process." if the user attempts to "end" the counter from the simulated command line using the key combination CTRL+C.

=== Words ===
In their [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/648330 Kickstarter Update #12] Cyan gave a hint at the bottom of the update: '''"/words/<AMA>"'''. By appending the hiredark URL with "/words/", it was found that http://hiredark.com/words/ is a valid page, but no access granted.

Having a look again to the [http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ozzcx/rand_miller_here_cocreator_of_myst_riven_got_a/ reddit AMA page], it was suspicious that Rand Miller used the word "swell" really often in his welcome message. Adding "swell" to the URL again gave a valid page http://hiredark.com/words/swell/ which contains the text of an apparently "nonsense" poem. Searching for the text of the strange poem using a search engine revealed that the text was derived from the poetry of Walt Whitman, specifically the poem [http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/on_the_beach_at_night_alone.html "On the Beach at Night Alone"]. As one can see, every fourth word from this poem is used to derive the Cyan versions of it.

The following day, Rand fave a hint in an [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQLZzwFS3rs&t=49m10s In-Game Chat interview] ("'''/words/<update#6>'''"), and a new page was found, http://hiredark.com/words/surprise/. These words are also every fourth word of the Whitman poem, but with an offset of -1 compared to the /swell words (that is, each word in /surprise is the word in Whitman just before the word used in /swell.)

Following the pattern of looking for prominent or frequently-used words in the updates, two additional pages were discovered, at [http://www.hiredark.com/words/add-on/ words/add-on] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/640239 update #7])and [http://www.hiredark.com/words/name/ words/name] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/646673 update #11]). These pages contained the rest of the words to the Whitman poem, with an offset of -3 and -2 respectively from the first page discovered.

After reconstructing the poem through these pages, it was discovered that one word was different from the original - "shades" instead of "worlds" in verse 8.

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Whitman's "On the Beach at Night Alone"
|-
|
:On the ''beach'' '''at''' night alone, 
:''As'' '''the''' old mother ''sways'' '''her''' to and ''fro'' '''singing''' her husky ''song,'' 
:'''As''' I watch ''the'' '''bright''' stars shining, ''I'' '''think''' a thought ''of'' '''the''' clef of ''the'' '''universes''' and of ''the'' '''future.''' 
: 
:A vast ''similitude'' '''interlocks''' all, 
:All ''spheres,'' '''grown,''' ungrown, small, ''large,'' '''suns,''' moons, planets, 
:''All'' '''distances''' of place ''however'' '''wide,''' 
:All distances ''of'' '''time,''' all inanimate ''forms,'' 
:'''All''' souls, all ''living'' '''bodies''' though they ''be'' '''ever''' so different, ''or'' '''in''' different worlds, 
:''All'' '''gaseous,''' watery, vegetable, ''mineral'' '''processes,''' the fishes, ''the'' '''brutes,''' 
:All nations, ''colors,'' '''barbarisms,''' civilizations, languages, 
:''All'' '''identities''' that have ''existed'' '''or''' may exist ''on'' '''this''' globe, or ''any'' '''globe,''' 
:All lives ''and'' '''deaths,''' all of ''the'' '''past,''' present, future, 
:''This'' '''vast''' similitude spans ''them,'' '''and''' always has ''spann'd,'' 
:'''And''' shall forever ''span'' '''them''' and compactly ''hold'' '''and''' enclose them. 
|}

(The bold and italic faces only emphasize the connections between the versions, and are not original to the Whitman poem.)

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! hiredark.com/words/add-on/
! hiredark.com/words/name/
! hiredark.com/words/surprise
! hiredark.com/words/swell
|-
|
On night 
old to her 
I stars a clef and 
 
A all, 
ungrown, moons, 
of 
All all 
souls, though so different 
watery, the 
All civilizations, 
that may globe, 
All all present, 
similitude always 
shall and enclose 
|
<center>
the alone, 
mother and husky 
watch shining, thought of of 
 
vast 
All small, planets, 
place 
distances inanimate 
all they different, '''shades,''' 
vegetable, fishes, 
nations, languages, 
have exist, or 
lives of future, 
spans has 
forever compactly them. 
</center>
|
beach 
As sways fro, song, 
the I of the the 
 
similitude 
spheres, large, 
All however 
of forms, 
living be or 
All mineral the 
colors, 
All existed, on any 
and the 
This them, spann'd, 
span hold 
|
<center>
at 
the her singing 
As bright think the universes, future. 
 
interlocks 
grown, suns, 
distances wide, 
time, 
All bodies, ever in 
gaseous, processes, brutes, 
barbarisms, 
identities or this globe, 
deaths, past, 
vast and 
And them and 
</center>
|-
| <center>each 4th word, offset -3</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -2</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -1</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset 0</center>
|}

=== Worlds ===
Guessing that "words" could be a misspelling, simply trying to browse to http://hiredark.com/worlds/ revealed that this opens a page as well; a page with a pure black background and nothing else in it.

Either once this link was posted in the Cyan forums (assuming Cyan employees watching the progress in the thread) - or by simply refreshing the content of the browser (assuming there is some automated mechanism updating content) - had the effect that the page now contained a small circle. This circle was an image named "worlds.png" (circle color = #667766). It had already been observed that the dot-color of Cyan's logo had slightly changed from a bright cyan (#00d8ff) to a color with hex value #667766.

The content of the page worlds changed again almost immediately; this time the color of the circle changed was #637777, and the png image was replaced by an svg version. This change coincided with an identical change in the color of the dot in the Cyan logo. The color of both dots then changed again, this time to #55557A.

After the four portions of the Walt Whitman poem were discovered, a discrepancy was noted in the /words/name/ portion of the poetry. Where the word "worlds" should have appeared, there was instead the word "shades" (see above table). Upon attempting the url http://www.hiredark.com/worlds/shades/ , yet another page was discovered which had not one but four circles, each in a different color corresponding to one of the previous color values of the Cyan dot.

In the next few days the dot color changed multiple times, and with each change a corresponding new circle was added for a total of nine circles arranged vertically. The colors of these have hex values of #667766, #637777, #55557A, #333371, #445844, #729999, #888862, #114F11, and #222264.

The hex value for each color contains four identical digits and two that don't match. The non-matching digits are always a valid ASCII identifier for a letter. In order of appearance, these are 77=w, 63=c, 7A=z, 71=q, 58=X, 72=r, 62=b, 4F=O, 64=d. The four matching digits from each color are distinct values 1-9, suggesting an order in which they should be placed. When arranged in ascending numerical sequence by these digits, rather than by chronological appearance, the letters form the string "OdqXzwcbr". If entered as as part of the url it gives http://hiredark.com/OdqXzwcbr which at first was a blank page but now redirects to http://obduct.me

== Obduct.me ==
http://obduct.me consisted of the Cyan logo, in SVG form, on a black background. After the nine color changes (see above) the Cyan dot reverted to its original color and the C portion of the logo began to undergo similar color changes. The hex value of the first color was 6F7262, which is ASCII for "orb". Noticing that http://obduct.me/orb is an existing (only Forbidden) page, and assuming a similar pattern as before with using prominent words from Kickstarter updates, led to http://obduct.me/orb/scatter, which displays the single word "Karl". The page corresponds to a Cyan clue for <C1>/<Update #13>. 

The color of the C changed several more times. Following the above pattern, these led to the following pages with a single word of text: 

<C1>/<Update #13> with #6F7262="orb", so [http://obduct.me/orb/scatter orb/scatter], "Karl" 

<C2>/<Update #15> with #746F70="top", so [http://obduct.me/top/reward top/reward], "moved" 

<C3>/<Update #16> with #6C6970="lip", so [http://obduct.me/lip/officially lip/officially], "away" 

<C4>/<Update #18> with #626F77="bow", so [http://obduct.me/bow/disc bow/disc], "<today>" 

Note that the final clue was received via Cyan.com 's News page on Nov. 11, 2013. Rather than plain text, a .png image is shown containing <C4>/<Update#18> under a post heading of "Welcome". Further exploration revealed a new directory on the cyan.com domain of cyan.com/welcome . This leads to a page with comparable formatting to the Cyan News page but without any other posts. The .png hint image is there as well.

In the forum comments discussing these clues, some text was changed (presumably by a moderator). One set of changes, in red color, indicated that Cyan had given an official <C3>/<Update #16> clue (previously it had been successful guesswork). A second set of changes highlighted words or letters in blue. These included "<today>" (quote marks only), the individual letters g-o-o-g-l-e in a series of consecutive posts, and "November 11" (including quotes and text). In [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=2409#p2409 a post] describing one of the possible google hits, the word "correct" was also turned blue. The link in the post is to [http://www.ufobc.ca/kinross/planeMishaps/hunrathAndWilkinson.html a page] that describes the disappearance of one Karl Hunrath on November 11, 1953. Karl and the other passenger in his plane were purportedly flying to a rendezvous with a flying saucer to take them away from earth.

Following this hint, http://obduct.me/Hunrath was discovered (note that Hunrath is case-sensitive). That page displays a slightly different view of the farmhouse from the trailer, with a wooden signboard in front. The sign says "Welcome t* Hunrath", with a circular piece of the sign missing where the o of "to" would be.

== Hunrath.com ==
http://www.hunrath.com contains the same picture found on http://obduct.me/Hunrath, also contains the number 1389045600000 inside the webpage source code.
Using http://www.epochconverter.com/ converts this number to Mon, 06 Jan 2014 22:00:00 GMT. This is the same date as the countdown on http://hiredark.com/.

= Post-Kickstarter =
= Sites to Watch for Clues =

[http://obductiongame.com/ OBDUCTION website] (in the video)

[https://www.facebook.com/CyanGames Cyan's Facebook Page]

[http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/ Reddit]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts Obduction Kickstarter Updates]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/cyaninc/comments Cyan Comments on Kickstarter]

[https://twitter.com/cyanworlds Cyan on Twitter]

[https://twitter.com/ryanwarzecha/ Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) on Twitter]

[http://cyan.com/ Cyan website]

[https://www.pinterest.com/cyaninc/ Cyan on Pinterest]

[https://mobile.twitter.com/obduction Obduction on Twitter]

Obduction ARG

2013-11-18T14:11:15Z

Ccstat: Rewrote the "All Cyan Posts" section as "Pre-Kickstarter" and moved it to the beginning.

= Obduction Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Progress =

In late August, Cyan Worlds, Inc. began releasing hints and clues to what would later be revealed to be their new game project, Obduction. Prior to the Kickstarter campaign, several images were teased, some in encrypted form. These images were mostly screenshots from the then-unreleased Kickstarter trailer and included letters from the name Obduction, hinting at the title. 

During the Kickstarter campaign, Cyan released clues that led through a puzzle trail to several websites. Broadly, clues in the kickstarter video led to hiredark.com, which in turn led to the site obduct.me. The sites hunrath.com and cyan.com/welcome were also found in connection with these clues. This segment of the ARG was discussed extensively in the [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28 Kickstarter thread] on the Cyan forums.
 

The ARG-proper has yet to get underway.

= Pre-Kickstarter =
Beginning in September, 2013, Cyan employee Eric A Anderson (edoublea in the forums) posted several images related to the upcoming kickstarter campaign, some of which contained hidden information. While mysterious at the time, the images are now easily recognized as elements or screenshots from the kickstarter video. 

On September 10, Eric [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151380233143078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posted] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page. He later [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=546#p546 replied] in the forums that nothing is hidden in this first image. 

A [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151391065353078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 second image] on facebook was accompanied by the comment “Unbounded in its ken…” which is a quote from a Robert Gambol poem. Eric subsequently [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=528#p528 posted] an extended quote on the forums along with the clues “Maybe there are more levels to this than you know,” with the letters in “levels” fading to light grey, and “…maybe you need to make an adjustment to your thinking.” Upon adjusting the levels with image editing software, the obduction logo and a line of text [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=537#p537 become visible]. The text reads “736F6F64” which is ASCII for “soon.” 

A [https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151393080463078&id=9225241363 third image] is accompanied by the comment, "...and each step will be made in the wink of an eye," which is from The Wizard of Oz.
edoublea then [http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/1mk5wk/cyan_dropping_new_image_hints/ posts] on Reddit: "A wild clue has appeared! http://imgur.com/7KujlVh Enjoy. ;}" The wingdings in the word bubble translate to “NO!” making the image a rebus for steganograph (STEGAsaurus+NO+GRAPH). The other wingdings translate to “walking shark” which turns out to be a reference to mobilefish.com, which has an [http://www.mobilefish.com/services/steganography/steganography.php online steganography tool].
Processing the third image with no password using the mobilefish site yields [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=632#p632 an image of a seed] with the words, "Prepate to be scattered." Eric confirms that “prepate” is a typo on his part.
 

On Sep 28, Eric (@LemonLime) posted in Cyan Chat, "x6yoZIW Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains." The initial string [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=845#p845 leads to] an image: http://imgur.com/x6yoZIW, and the text is a quote from The Road by Cormac McCarthy. When no progress was made, Eric [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=914#p914 provided] a link to another steganography tool. After numerous unsuccessful attempts by players to decrypt using various passwords, Eric found that the site was broken and giving php errors. He provided the password (“mazes” from an extended version of the Cormac McCarthy quote) and a [http://imgur.com/PR0LeZP link to the embedded image].
 

Eric then posted in Cyan Chat, "/a/JJNoN I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along." This again points to [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=928#p928 an image] (at http://imgur.com/a/JJNoN). The quote is from “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” by Annie Dillard. An extended version of the quote contains the word “imperfections,” which is the password necessary to decrypt using the mobilefish site. The [http://i.imgur.com/zCDTvtZ.jpg embedded image] was a Magic Eye puzzle in which letters are visible. Pieced together, the letters form "ODUCTiN."
[http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=947#p947 Remembering] a comment by Rand at Mysterium 2009 about a potential project called Abduction, players [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=989#p989 soon found] an [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1052#p1052 image] with the word "Obduction" on the DRC site. Searching for obduction led to a [http://www.reddit.com/r/Obduction/comments/1odh0k/you_guys_waste_no_time/ Reddit post] by Eric containing a final image link: http://i.imgur.com/oRTaRx3.jpg.
 
Players quickly discovered the [http://obductiongame.com/ Obduction website] and [https://twitter.com/obduction Obduction Twitter account].
= Kickstarter Campaign =
== Kickstarter Video ==

During the Kickstarter video for the game, three words are displayed.

* 3:20 - yellowbrick
* 3:23 - firelight
* 4:05 - germinate

When these words are typed into posts at the Cyan forums, the ("swear-word") filter changes the words to:

* yellowbrick: is.gd
* firelight: odu
* germinate: tol

This was found to be a short URL link: http://is.gd/odutol

The shortlink led to a YouTube video with the title ''4/3 π r3'', uploaded by user ''Chester C''.

The title of the video is the formula for finding the volume of a sphere. The video is three seconds long, cycling through images of different round or spherical objects. The audio of the video (a series of high-pitched beeping sounds) was found to contain a [http://www.texturu.org/share/images/cyan-qr.jpg QR Code] leading to the site http://hiredark.com.

== Hiredark ==
The site hiredark.com simulates the appearance of a Linux/Unix shell (terminal) running a count-down timer. The timer is scripted in (dynamic) PHP, which generates a Javascript script. The units of the timer appear to be milliseconds, and the timer itself appears to be counting down to January 6, 2014. In addition, the script is coded to display the message "You do not have sufficient permission to cancel this process." if the user attempts to "end" the counter from the simulated command line using the key combination CTRL+C.

=== Words ===
In their [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/648330 Kickstarter Update #12] Cyan gave a hint at the bottom of the update: '''"/words/<AMA>"'''. By appending the hiredark URL with "/words/", it was found that http://hiredark.com/words/ is a valid page, but no access granted.

Having a look again to the [http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ozzcx/rand_miller_here_cocreator_of_myst_riven_got_a/ reddit AMA page], it was suspicious that Rand Miller used the word "swell" really often in his welcome message. Adding "swell" to the URL again gave a valid page http://hiredark.com/words/swell/ which contains the text of an apparently "nonsense" poem. Searching for the text of the strange poem using a search engine revealed that the text was derived from the poetry of Walt Whitman, specifically the poem [http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/on_the_beach_at_night_alone.html "On the Beach at Night Alone"]. As one can see, every fourth word from this poem is used to derive the Cyan versions of it.

The following day, Rand fave a hint in an [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQLZzwFS3rs&t=49m10s In-Game Chat interview] ("'''/words/<update#6>'''"), and a new page was found, http://hiredark.com/words/surprise/. These words are also every fourth word of the Whitman poem, but with an offset of -1 compared to the /swell words (that is, each word in /surprise is the word in Whitman just before the word used in /swell.)

Following the pattern of looking for prominent or frequently-used words in the updates, two additional pages were discovered, at [http://www.hiredark.com/words/add-on/ words/add-on] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/640239 update #7])and [http://www.hiredark.com/words/name/ words/name] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/646673 update #11]). These pages contained the rest of the words to the Whitman poem, with an offset of -3 and -2 respectively from the first page discovered.

After reconstructing the poem through these pages, it was discovered that one word was different from the original - "shades" instead of "worlds" in verse 8.

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Whitman's "On the Beach at Night Alone"
|-
|
:On the ''beach'' '''at''' night alone, 
:''As'' '''the''' old mother ''sways'' '''her''' to and ''fro'' '''singing''' her husky ''song,'' 
:'''As''' I watch ''the'' '''bright''' stars shining, ''I'' '''think''' a thought ''of'' '''the''' clef of ''the'' '''universes''' and of ''the'' '''future.''' 
: 
:A vast ''similitude'' '''interlocks''' all, 
:All ''spheres,'' '''grown,''' ungrown, small, ''large,'' '''suns,''' moons, planets, 
:''All'' '''distances''' of place ''however'' '''wide,''' 
:All distances ''of'' '''time,''' all inanimate ''forms,'' 
:'''All''' souls, all ''living'' '''bodies''' though they ''be'' '''ever''' so different, ''or'' '''in''' different worlds, 
:''All'' '''gaseous,''' watery, vegetable, ''mineral'' '''processes,''' the fishes, ''the'' '''brutes,''' 
:All nations, ''colors,'' '''barbarisms,''' civilizations, languages, 
:''All'' '''identities''' that have ''existed'' '''or''' may exist ''on'' '''this''' globe, or ''any'' '''globe,''' 
:All lives ''and'' '''deaths,''' all of ''the'' '''past,''' present, future, 
:''This'' '''vast''' similitude spans ''them,'' '''and''' always has ''spann'd,'' 
:'''And''' shall forever ''span'' '''them''' and compactly ''hold'' '''and''' enclose them. 
|}

(The bold and italic faces only emphasize the connections between the versions, and are not original to the Whitman poem.)

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! hiredark.com/words/add-on/
! hiredark.com/words/name/
! hiredark.com/words/surprise
! hiredark.com/words/swell
|-
|
On night 
old to her 
I stars a clef and 
 
A all, 
ungrown, moons, 
of 
All all 
souls, though so different 
watery, the 
All civilizations, 
that may globe, 
All all present, 
similitude always 
shall and enclose 
|
<center>
the alone, 
mother and husky 
watch shining, thought of of 
 
vast 
All small, planets, 
place 
distances inanimate 
all they different, '''shades,''' 
vegetable, fishes, 
nations, languages, 
have exist, or 
lives of future, 
spans has 
forever compactly them. 
</center>
|
beach 
As sways fro, song, 
the I of the the 
 
similitude 
spheres, large, 
All however 
of forms, 
living be or 
All mineral the 
colors, 
All existed, on any 
and the 
This them, spann'd, 
span hold 
|
<center>
at 
the her singing 
As bright think the universes, future. 
 
interlocks 
grown, suns, 
distances wide, 
time, 
All bodies, ever in 
gaseous, processes, brutes, 
barbarisms, 
identities or this globe, 
deaths, past, 
vast and 
And them and 
</center>
|-
| <center>each 4th word, offset -3</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -2</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -1</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset 0</center>
|}

=== Worlds ===
Guessing that "words" could be a misspelling, simply trying to browse to http://hiredark.com/worlds/ revealed that this opens a page as well; a page with a pure black background and nothing else in it.

Either once this link was posted in the Cyan forums (assuming Cyan employees watching the progress in the thread) - or by simply refreshing the content of the browser (assuming there is some automated mechanism updating content) - had the effect that the page now contained a small circle. This circle was an image named "worlds.png" (circle color = #667766). It had already been observed that the dot-color of Cyan's logo had slightly changed from a bright cyan (#00d8ff) to a color with hex value #667766.

The content of the page worlds changed again almost immediately; this time the color of the circle changed was #637777, and the png image was replaced by an svg version. This change coincided with an identical change in the color of the dot in the Cyan logo. The color of both dots then changed again, this time to #55557A.

After the four portions of the Walt Whitman poem were discovered, a discrepancy was noted in the /words/name/ portion of the poetry. Where the word "worlds" should have appeared, there was instead the word "shades" (see above table). Upon attempting the url http://www.hiredark.com/worlds/shades/ , yet another page was discovered which had not one but four circles, each in a different color corresponding to one of the previous color values of the Cyan dot.

In the next few days the color changed multiple times, and with each change a new circle was added for a total of nine circles arranged vertically. The colors of these have hex values of #667766, #637777, #55557A, #333371, #445844, #729999, #888862, #114F11, and #222264. The newest circle always matched the colors that have appeared on the /worlds/ page and also the color of the Cyan logo dot.

The hex value for each color contains four identical digits and two that don't match. The non-matching digits are always a valid ASCII identifier for a letter. In order of appearance, these are 77=w, 63=c, 7A=z, 71=q, 58=X, 72=r, 62=b, 4F=O, 64=d. The four matching digits from each color are distinct values 1-9, suggesting an order in which they should be placed. When arranged in ascending numerical sequence by these digits, rather than by chronological appearance, the letters form the string "OdqXzwcbr". If entered as as part of the url it gives http://hiredark.com/OdqXzwcbr which at first was a blank page but now redirects to http://obduct.me

=== Obduct.me ===
http://obduct.me consisted of the Cyan logo, in SVG form, on a black background. After the nine color changes (see above) the Cyan dot reverted to its original color and the C portion of the logo began to undergo similar color changes. The hex value of the first color was 6F7262, which is ASCII for "orb". Noticing that http://obduct.me/orb is an existing (only Forbidden) page, and assuming a similar pattern as before with using prominent words from Kickstarter updates, led to http://obduct.me/orb/scatter, which displays the single word "Karl". The page corresponds to a Cyan clue for <C1>/<Update #13>. 

The color of the C changed several more times. Following the above pattern, these led to the following pages with a single word of text: 

<C1>/<Update #13> with #6F7262="orb", so [http://obduct.me/orb/scatter orb/scatter], "Karl" 

<C2>/<Update #15> with #746F70="top", so [http://obduct.me/top/reward top/reward], "moved" 

<C3>/<Update #16> with #6C6970="lip", so [http://obduct.me/lip/officially lip/officially], "away" 

<C4>/<Update #18> with #626F77="bow", so [http://obduct.me/bow/disc bow/disc], "<today>" 

Note that the final clue was received via Cyan.com 's News page on Nov. 11, 2013. Rather than plain text, a .png image is shown containing <C4>/<Update#18> under a post heading of "Welcome". Further exploration revealed a new directory on the cyan.com domain of cyan.com/welcome . This leads to a page with comparable formatting to the Cyan News page but without any other posts. The .png hint image is there as well.

In the forum comments discussing these clues, some text was changed (presumably by a moderator). One set of changes, in red color, indicated that Cyan had given an official <C3>/<Update #16> clue (previously it had been successful guesswork). A second set of changes highlighted words or letters in blue, ostensibly to draw attention to them. These included "<today>" (quote marks only), the individual letters g-o-o-g-l-e in a series of consecutive posts, and "November 11" (including quotes and text).
In [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=2409#p2409 a post] describing one of the possible google hits, the word "correct" was also turned blue. The link in the post is to [http://www.ufobc.ca/kinross/planeMishaps/hunrathAndWilkinson.html a page] that describes the disappearance of one Karl Hunrath on November 11, 1953. Karl and the other passenger in his plane were purpotedly flying to a rendezvous with a flying saucer to take them away from earth.

Following this hint, http://obduct.me/Hunrath is a valid page (note that Hunrath is case-sensitive). That page displays a slightly different view of the farmhouse from the trailer, with a wooden signboard in front. The sign says "Welcome t* Hunrath", with a circular piece of the sign missing where the o of "to" would be.

== Hunrath.com ==
http://www.hunrath.com contains the same picture found on http://obduct.me/Hunrath, also contains the number 1389045600000 inside the webpage source code.
Using http://www.epochconverter.com/ converts this number to Mon, 06 Jan 2014 22:00:00 GMT. This is the same date as the countdown on http://hiredark.com/.

= Post-Kickstarter =
= Sites to Watch for Clues =

[http://obductiongame.com/ OBDUCTION website] (in the video)

[https://www.facebook.com/CyanGames Cyan's Facebook Page]

[http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/ Reddit]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts Obduction Kickstarter Updates]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/cyaninc/comments Cyan Comments on Kickstarter]

[https://twitter.com/cyanworlds Cyan on Twitter]

[https://twitter.com/ryanwarzecha/ Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) on Twitter]

[http://cyan.com/ Cyan website]

[https://www.pinterest.com/cyaninc/ Cyan on Pinterest]

[https://mobile.twitter.com/obduction Obduction on Twitter]

Obduction ARG

2013-11-13T02:26:43Z

Ccstat: /* Obduct.me */ added Hunrath clue and solution

== Obduction Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Progress ==

In late August, Cyan Worlds, Inc. began releasing hints and clues to what would later be revealed to be their new game project, Obduction. Prior to the Kickstarter campaign, several images were teased in encrypted form. These images were mostly screenshots from the then-unreleased Kickstarter trailer and included letters from the name Obduction, hinting at the title. (See the "All Cyan Posts" section below for specifics). 
With the beginning of the Kickstarter campaign, Cyan released clues through the kickstarter material and surrounding promotional activity that have so far led to several websites. This segment of the ARG is ongoing, discussed actively in the [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28 Kickstarter thread] on the Cyan forums. Broadly, clues in the kickstarter video led to a website called hiredark.com, which has several sub-directories with various clues. These clues have since led to the site obduct.me.

== Kickstarter Video ==

During the Kickstarter video for the game, three words are displayed.

* 3:20 - yellowbrick
* 3:23 - firelight
* 4:05 - germinate

When these words are typed into posts at the Cyan forums, the ("swear-word") filter changes the words to:

* yellowbrick: is.gd
* firelight: odu
* germinate: tol

This was found to be a short URL link: http://is.gd/odutol

The shortlink led to a YouTube video with the title ''4/3 π r3'', uploaded by user ''Chester C''.

The title of the video is the formula for finding the volume of a sphere. The video is three seconds long, cycling through images of different round or spherical objects. The audio of the video (a series of high-pitched beeping sounds) was found to contain a [http://www.texturu.org/share/images/cyan-qr.jpg QR Code] leading to the site http://hiredark.com.

== Hiredark ==
The site hiredark.com simulates the appearance of a Linux/Unix shell (terminal) running a count-down timer. The timer is scripted in (dynamic) PHP, which generates a Javascript script. The units of the timer appear to be milliseconds, and the timer itself appears to be counting down to January 6, 2014. In addition, the script is coded to display the message "You do not have sufficient permission to cancel this process." if the user attempts to "end" the counter from the simulated command line using the key combination CTRL+C.

=== Words ===
In their [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/648330 Kickstarter Update #12] Cyan gave a hint at the bottom of the update: '''"/words/<AMA>"'''. By appending the hiredark URL with "/words/", it was found that http://hiredark.com/words/ is a valid page, but no access granted.

Having a look again to the [http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ozzcx/rand_miller_here_cocreator_of_myst_riven_got_a/ reddit AMA page], it was suspicious that Rand Miller used the word "swell" really often in his welcome message. Adding "swell" to the URL again gave a valid page http://hiredark.com/words/swell/ which contains the text of an apparently "nonsense" poem. Searching for the text of the strange poem using a search engine revealed that the text was derived from the poetry of Walt Whitman, specifically the poem [http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/on_the_beach_at_night_alone.html "On the Beach at Night Alone"]. As one can see, every fourth word from this poem is used to derive the Cyan versions of it.

The following day, Rand fave a hint in an [http://www.twitch.tv/ingamechat/b/476050041 In-Game Chat interview] ("'''/words/<update#6>'''"), and a new page was found, http://hiredark.com/words/surprise/. These words are also every fourth word of the Whitman poem, but with an offset of -1 compared to the /swell words (that is, each word in /surprise is the word in Whitman just before the word used in /swell.)

Following the pattern of looking for prominent or frequently-used words in the updates, two additional pages were discovered, at [http://www.hiredark.com/words/add-on/ words/add-on] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/640239 update #7])and [http://www.hiredark.com/words/name/ words/name] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/646673 update #11]). These pages contained the rest of the words to the Whitman poem, with an offset of -3 and -2 respectively from the first page discovered.

After reconstructing the poem through these pages, it was discovered that one word was different from the original - "shades" instead of "worlds" in verse 8.

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Whitman's "On the Beach at Night Alone"
|-
|
:On the ''beach'' '''at''' night alone, 
:''As'' '''the''' old mother ''sways'' '''her''' to and ''fro'' '''singing''' her husky ''song,'' 
:'''As''' I watch ''the'' '''bright''' stars shining, ''I'' '''think''' a thought ''of'' '''the''' clef of ''the'' '''universes''' and of ''the'' '''future.''' 
: 
:A vast ''similitude'' '''interlocks''' all, 
:All ''spheres,'' '''grown,''' ungrown, small, ''large,'' '''suns,''' moons, planets, 
:''All'' '''distances''' of place ''however'' '''wide,''' 
:All distances ''of'' '''time,''' all inanimate ''forms,'' 
:'''All''' souls, all ''living'' '''bodies''' though they ''be'' '''ever''' so different, ''or'' '''in''' different worlds, 
:''All'' '''gaseous,''' watery, vegetable, ''mineral'' '''processes,''' the fishes, ''the'' '''brutes,''' 
:All nations, ''colors,'' '''barbarisms,''' civilizations, languages, 
:''All'' '''identities''' that have ''existed'' '''or''' may exist ''on'' '''this''' globe, or ''any'' '''globe,''' 
:All lives ''and'' '''deaths,''' all of ''the'' '''past,''' present, future, 
:''This'' '''vast''' similitude spans ''them,'' '''and''' always has ''spann'd,'' 
:'''And''' shall forever ''span'' '''them''' and compactly ''hold'' '''and''' enclose them. 
|}

(The bold and italic faces only emphasize the connections between the versions, and are not original to the Whitman poem.)

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! hiredark.com/words/add-on/
! hiredark.com/words/name/
! hiredark.com/words/surprise
! hiredark.com/words/swell
|-
|
On night 
old to her 
I stars a clef and 
 
A all, 
ungrown, moons, 
of 
All all 
souls, though so different 
watery, the 
All civilizations, 
that may globe, 
All all present, 
similitude always 
shall and enclose 
|
<center>
the alone, 
mother and husky 
watch shining, thought of of 
 
vast 
All small, planets, 
place 
distances inanimate 
all they different, '''shades,''' 
vegetable, fishes, 
nations, languages, 
have exist, or 
lives of future, 
spans has 
forever compactly them. 
</center>
|
beach 
As sways fro, song, 
the I of the the 
 
similitude 
spheres, large, 
All however 
of forms, 
living be or 
All mineral the 
colors, 
All existed, on any 
and the 
This them, spann'd, 
span hold 
|
<center>
at 
the her singing 
As bright think the universes, future. 
 
interlocks 
grown, suns, 
distances wide, 
time, 
All bodies, ever in 
gaseous, processes, brutes, 
barbarisms, 
identities or this globe, 
deaths, past, 
vast and 
And them and 
</center>
|-
| <center>each 4th word, offset -3</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -2</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -1</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset 0</center>
|}

=== Worlds ===
Guessing that "words" could be a misspelling, simply trying to browse to http://hiredark.com/worlds/ revealed that this opens a page as well; a page with a pure black background and nothing else in it.

Either once this link was posted in the Cyan forums (assuming Cyan employees watching the progress in the thread) - or by simply refreshing the content of the browser (assuming there is some automated mechanism updating content) - had the effect that the page now contained a small circle. This circle was an image named "worlds.png" (circle color = #667766). It had already been observed that the dot-color of Cyan's logo had slightly changed from a bright cyan (#00d8ff) to a color with hex value #667766.

The content of the page worlds changed again almost immediately; this time the color of the circle changed was #637777, and the png image was replaced by an svg version. This change coincided with an identical change in the color of the dot in the Cyan logo. The color of both dots then changed again, this time to #55557A.

After the four portions of the Walt Whitman poem were discovered, a discrepancy was noted in the /words/name/ portion of the poetry. Where the word "worlds" should have appeared, there was instead the word "shades" (see above table). Upon attempting the url http://www.hiredark.com/worlds/shades/ , yet another page was discovered which had not one but four circles, each in a different color corresponding to one of the previous color values of the Cyan dot.

In the next few days the color changed multiple times, and with each change a new circle was added for a total of nine circles arranged vertically. The colors of these have hex values of #667766, #637777, #55557A, #333371, #445844, #729999, #888862, #114F11, and #222264. The newest circle always matched the colors that have appeared on the /worlds/ page and also the color of the Cyan logo dot.

The hex value for each color contains four identical digits and two that don't match. The non-matching digits are always a valid ASCII identifier for a letter. In order of appearance, these are 77=w, 63=c, 7A=z, 71=q, 58=X, 72=r, 62=b, 4F=O, 64=d. The four matching digits from each color are distinct values 1-9, suggesting an order in which they should be placed. When arranged in ascending numerical sequence by these digits, rather than by chronological appearance, the letters form the string "OdqXzwcbr". If entered as as part of the url it gives http://hiredark.com/OdqXzwcbr which at first was a blank page but now redirects to http://obduct.me

== Obduct.me ==
http://obduct.me consisted of the Cyan logo, in SVG form, on a black background. After the nine color changes (see above) the Cyan dot reverted to its original color and the C portion of the logo began to undergo similar color changes. The hex value of the first color was 6F7262, which is ASCII for "orb". Noticing that http://obduct.me/orb is an existing (only Forbidden) page, and assuming a similar pattern as before with using prominent words from Kickstarter updates, led to http://obduct.me/orb/scatter, which displays the single word "Karl". The page corresponds to a Cyan clue for <C1>/<Update #13>. 

The color of the C changed several more times. Following the above pattern, these led to the following pages with a single word of text: 

<C1>/<Update #13> with #6F7262="orb", so [http://obduct.me/orb/scatter orb/scatter], "Karl" 

<C2>/<Update #15> with #746F70="top", so [http://obduct.me/top/reward top/reward], "moved" 

<C3>/<Update #16> with #6C6970="lip", so [http://obduct.me/lip/officially lip/officially], "away" 

<C4>/<Update #18> with #626F77="bow", so [http://obduct.me/bow/disc bow/disc], "<today>" 

Note that the final clue was received via Cyan.com 's News page on Nov. 11, 2013. Rather than plain text, a .png image is shown containing <C4>/<Update#18> under a post heading of "Welcome". Further exploration revealed a new directory on the cyan.com domain of cyan.com/welcome . This leads to a page with comparable formatting to the Cyan News page but without any other posts. The .png hint image is there as well.

In the forum comments discussing these clues, some text was changed (presumably by a moderator). One set of changes, in red color, indicated that Cyan had given an official <C3>/<Update #16> clue (previously it had been successful guesswork). A second set of changes highlighted words or letters in blue, ostensibly to draw attention to them. These included "<today>" (quote marks only), the individual letters g-o-o-g-l-e in a series of consecutive posts, and "November 11" (including quotes and text).
In [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=2409#p2409 a post] describing one of the possible google hits, the word "correct" was also turned blue. The link in the post is to [http://www.ufobc.ca/kinross/planeMishaps/hunrathAndWilkinson.html a page] that describes the disappearance of one Karl Hunrath on November 11, 1953. Karl and the other passenger in his plane were purpotedly flying to a rendezvous with a flying saucer to take them away from earth.

Following this hint, http://obduct.me/Hunrath is a valid page (note that Hunrath is case-sensitive). That page displays a slightly different view of the farmhouse from the trailer, with a wooden signboard in front. The sign says "Welcome t* Hunrath", with a circular piece of the sign missing where the o of "to" would be.

== Sites to Watch for Clues ==

[http://obductiongame.com/ OBDUCTION website] (in the video)

[https://www.facebook.com/CyanGames Cyan's Facebook Page]

[http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/ Reddit]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts Obduction Kickstarter Updates]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/cyaninc/comments Cyan Comments on Kickstarter]

[https://twitter.com/cyanworlds Cyan on Twitter]

[https://twitter.com/ryanwarzecha/ Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) on Twitter]

[http://cyan.com/ Cyan website]

[https://www.pinterest.com/cyaninc/ Cyan on Pinterest]

[https://mobile.twitter.com/obduction Obduction on Twitter]

== All Cyan Posts ==

A reference section, these are all posts by Cyanists leading up to and throughout the Kickstarter campaign. This might give some clues on how they think and where their posts might appear. Also, some of the clues might still be relevant to later puzzles. Unless otherwise stated, all of the posts & statements quoted below are from the [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28 Looking Forward to that Kickstarter ;)] thread on the Cyan forums.

Sep 10: Eric A Anderson (edoublea) [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151380233143078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page under “Photos of Cyan Inc.” with the comment, "...I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, and I must admit however, such conjecture is futile..." Ainia speculates it has something to do with an outside project of Eric's, The Witness. edoublea replies, "Nope. Think '''FARTHER'''." Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=405#p405 posts], "However Montana has some nice trees, ever think of looking over there?" greydragon will later [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=664#p664 post] "Montana means nothing - The quote on the first one has nothing to do with this game... We just wanted you to read it all the way through and say... 'the ending has not yet been written'"

Sep 15: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151391065353078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page with the comment, "Unbounded in its ken..." Zardoz [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=495#p495 posts] "The quote is from a Robert Gambol poem (The Beauties of the Universe, 1732, partially reproduced below):"

Sep 16: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=528#p528 posts], "Unbounded in its ken, from prison free / Will clearly view what here we darkly see: / Those planetary worlds, and thousands more, / Now veil’d from human sight, it shall explore." and "Maybe there are more levels to this than you know." with the word "levels" fading in color. Zardoz speculates "I think the point of "levels" is the shades of grey - which is to say that eaa is telling us the poem itself is important" and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=533#p533 replies], "Perhaps. Or maybe you need to make an adjustment to your thinking."

Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=538#p538 posts an image] which, after various image processing things with the exposure and contrast, reveals hidden letters.

Samsbase wonders about the first image and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=546#p546 replies] "Or maybe.... just maybe... eaa didn't embed anything in the first one, because he didn't realize people wanted so desperately to FIND things, and has since remedied that with the follow-ups. But you can keep digging, if you really want to." all in tiny font except for the "keep digging." This turns out to be simply a reference to planting seeds.

Sep 17: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151393080463078&id=9225241363 posts] an image on Cyan's Facebook page with the comment, "...and each step will be made in the wink of an eye." which is from The Wizard of Oz. Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=548#p548 posts] the quote.

edoublea [http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/1mk5wk/cyan_dropping_new_image_hints/ posts] on Reddit: "A wild clue has appeared! http://imgur.com/7KujlVh Enjoy. ;}" and greydragon posts on his personal Facebook page, "Reddit is fun ;)" Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=590#p590 posts] about these and begins the speculation. Madhatt3r deciphers the wingdings in the image to read "walking shark" and Rehvaro [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=597#p597 posts] "Why a Stegosaurus ? Why a Graph ? Why "No!" ? Maybe it's a "rebus": Stego + No! + Graph = Steganography ?" Several people try different things with stenography sites, but get nowhere. Zib figures out that "walking shark" means mobilefish.com, tries the image there and gets [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=632#p632 an image of a seed] with the words, "Prepate to be scattered." edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=644#p644 posts], "Dang it. That's what I get for not spell-checking my ominous clues before cryptographically encoding them in abstact sneak-peek images. I promus to spel bettr next tyme."

Madhatt3r [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=673#p673 posts] an image of the two images together which appears to be a plant sprouting from a seed.

Sep 28: <@LemonLime> (Eric) posts in Cyan Chat: "x6yoZIW Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains." Ahlisendar [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=845#p845 posts the image] and Buzzle1 [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=846#p846 posts] an excerpt from The Road by Cormac McCarthy which includes the quote posted by LemonLime as well as "Maps and mazes."

Oct 2: [http://www.inlander.com/spokane/writing-the-next-age/Content?oid=2194852 Inlander article about Myst 20th Anniversary] mentions Cyan's plans to launch a Kickstarter soon and Rand offers the teaser, "A white picket fence and an old farmhouse on a strange and alien world, without explanation for how they arrived."

Oct 5: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=914#p914 posts] "Since everyone gave up... http://www.devfarm.it/steganography/" The players now try the images and various passwords in this site, but without luck.

Oct 6: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=924#p924 posts] that the site doesn't seem to be working, apologizes and gives the answer: "The password was "mazes", from that Cormac McCarthy quote. Rather than watch everyone fight with a broken PHP error, I'm just going to leave the decrypted payload image right here...http://imgur.com/PR0LeZP"

Oct 6: LemonLime posts in CyanChat: "/a/JJNoN I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along." Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=928#p928 posts] the image and an excerpt from "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard which includes the line quoted by LemonLime as well as the word, "imperfections" which was the key Zib used with mobilefish to find a new [http://i.imgur.com/zCDTvtZ.jpg image] which appeared to be a Magic Eye puzzle. The players were able to see letters in the image and finally work out "ODUCTiN." Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=947#p947 posts] that his brother remembered something Rand said at Mysterium 2009: "…there was a project called Abduction which was more of a single player game..."

Oct 10: Shahneer [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=989#p989 posts] about discovering an image with the word "Obduction" on the DRC site.
Oct 12: WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1023#p1023 posts] a partial image of what he captured from the DRC site.

Oct 13: Buzzle1 discovers [http://redditmetrics.com/r/Obduction] which links to a [http://www.reddit.com/r/Obduction/comments/1odh0k/you_guys_waste_no_time/ post on Reddit] by edoublea: "You guys waste no time. And for that, your reward: http://i.imgur.com/oRTaRx3.jpg"

Oct 14: Trekluver posts a link to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obduction Obduction wikipedia article] and WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1052#p1052 posts] the full image of what he captured from the DRC site. andys1376 discovers the [http://obductiongame.com/ Obduction website]

Oct 15: Chogon [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1068&f=5#p1068 posts] an announcement about an upcoming forum outage and update which includes the line, "And 3) I hope this doesn't interfere with the timing of the … what's that? Gotta go."

Oct 16: rivenwanderer discovers an [https://twitter.com/obduction Obduction Twitter account].

Obduction ARG

2013-11-12T23:15:18Z

Ccstat: /* Obduct.me */ typo fix

== Obduction Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Progress ==

In late August, Cyan Worlds, Inc. began releasing hints and clues to what would later be revealed to be their new game project, Obduction. Prior to the Kickstarter campaign, several images were teased in encrypted form. These images were mostly screenshots from the then-unreleased Kickstarter trailer and included letters from the name Obduction, hinting at the title. (See the "All Cyan Posts" section below for specifics). 
With the beginning of the Kickstarter campaign, Cyan released clues through the kickstarter material and surrounding promotional activity that have so far led to several websites. This segment of the ARG is ongoing, discussed actively in the [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28 Kickstarter thread] on the Cyan forums. Broadly, clues in the kickstarter video led to a website called hiredark.com, which has several sub-directories with various clues. These clues have since led to the site obduct.me.

== Kickstarter Video ==

During the Kickstarter video for the game, three words are displayed.

* 3:20 - yellowbrick
* 3:23 - firelight
* 4:05 - germinate

When these words are typed into posts at the Cyan forums, the ("swear-word") filter changes the words to:

* yellowbrick: is.gd
* firelight: odu
* germinate: tol

This was found to be a short URL link: http://is.gd/odutol

The shortlink led to a YouTube video with the title ''4/3 π r3'', uploaded by user ''Chester C''.

The title of the video is the formula for finding the volume of a sphere. The video is three seconds long, cycling through images of different round or spherical objects. The audio of the video (a series of high-pitched beeping sounds) was found to contain a [http://www.texturu.org/share/images/cyan-qr.jpg QR Code] leading to the site http://hiredark.com.

== Hiredark ==
The site hiredark.com simulates the appearance of a Linux/Unix shell (terminal) running a count-down timer. The timer is scripted in (dynamic) PHP, which generates a Javascript script. The units of the timer appear to be milliseconds, and the timer itself appears to be counting down to January 6, 2014. In addition, the script is coded to display the message "You do not have sufficient permission to cancel this process." if the user attempts to "end" the counter from the simulated command line using the key combination CTRL+C.

=== Words ===
In their [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/648330 Kickstarter Update #12] Cyan gave a hint at the bottom of the update: '''"/words/<AMA>"'''. By appending the hiredark URL with "/words/", it was found that http://hiredark.com/words/ is a valid page, but no access granted.

Having a look again to the [http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ozzcx/rand_miller_here_cocreator_of_myst_riven_got_a/ reddit AMA page], it was suspicious that Rand Miller used the word "swell" really often in his welcome message. Adding "swell" to the URL again gave a valid page http://hiredark.com/words/swell/ which contains the text of an apparently "nonsense" poem. Searching for the text of the strange poem using a search engine revealed that the text was derived from the poetry of Walt Whitman, specifically the poem [http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/on_the_beach_at_night_alone.html "On the Beach at Night Alone"]. As one can see, every fourth word from this poem is used to derive the Cyan versions of it.

The following day, Rand fave a hint in an [http://www.twitch.tv/ingamechat/b/476050041 In-Game Chat interview] ("'''/words/<update#6>'''"), and a new page was found, http://hiredark.com/words/surprise/. These words are also every fourth word of the Whitman poem, but with an offset of -1 compared to the /swell words (that is, each word in /surprise is the word in Whitman just before the word used in /swell.)

Following the pattern of looking for prominent or frequently-used words in the updates, two additional pages were discovered, at [http://www.hiredark.com/words/add-on/ words/add-on] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/640239 update #7])and [http://www.hiredark.com/words/name/ words/name] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/646673 update #11]). These pages contained the rest of the words to the Whitman poem, with an offset of -3 and -2 respectively from the first page discovered.

After reconstructing the poem through these pages, it was discovered that one word was different from the original - "shades" instead of "worlds" in verse 8.

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Whitman's "On the Beach at Night Alone"
|-
|
:On the ''beach'' '''at''' night alone, 
:''As'' '''the''' old mother ''sways'' '''her''' to and ''fro'' '''singing''' her husky ''song,'' 
:'''As''' I watch ''the'' '''bright''' stars shining, ''I'' '''think''' a thought ''of'' '''the''' clef of ''the'' '''universes''' and of ''the'' '''future.''' 
: 
:A vast ''similitude'' '''interlocks''' all, 
:All ''spheres,'' '''grown,''' ungrown, small, ''large,'' '''suns,''' moons, planets, 
:''All'' '''distances''' of place ''however'' '''wide,''' 
:All distances ''of'' '''time,''' all inanimate ''forms,'' 
:'''All''' souls, all ''living'' '''bodies''' though they ''be'' '''ever''' so different, ''or'' '''in''' different worlds, 
:''All'' '''gaseous,''' watery, vegetable, ''mineral'' '''processes,''' the fishes, ''the'' '''brutes,''' 
:All nations, ''colors,'' '''barbarisms,''' civilizations, languages, 
:''All'' '''identities''' that have ''existed'' '''or''' may exist ''on'' '''this''' globe, or ''any'' '''globe,''' 
:All lives ''and'' '''deaths,''' all of ''the'' '''past,''' present, future, 
:''This'' '''vast''' similitude spans ''them,'' '''and''' always has ''spann'd,'' 
:'''And''' shall forever ''span'' '''them''' and compactly ''hold'' '''and''' enclose them. 
|}

(The bold and italic faces only emphasize the connections between the versions, and are not original to the Whitman poem.)

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! hiredark.com/words/add-on/
! hiredark.com/words/name/
! hiredark.com/words/surprise
! hiredark.com/words/swell
|-
|
On night 
old to her 
I stars a clef and 
 
A all, 
ungrown, moons, 
of 
All all 
souls, though so different 
watery, the 
All civilizations, 
that may globe, 
All all present, 
similitude always 
shall and enclose 
|
<center>
the alone, 
mother and husky 
watch shining, thought of of 
 
vast 
All small, planets, 
place 
distances inanimate 
all they different, '''shades,''' 
vegetable, fishes, 
nations, languages, 
have exist, or 
lives of future, 
spans has 
forever compactly them. 
</center>
|
beach 
As sways fro, song, 
the I of the the 
 
similitude 
spheres, large, 
All however 
of forms, 
living be or 
All mineral the 
colors, 
All existed, on any 
and the 
This them, spann'd, 
span hold 
|
<center>
at 
the her singing 
As bright think the universes, future. 
 
interlocks 
grown, suns, 
distances wide, 
time, 
All bodies, ever in 
gaseous, processes, brutes, 
barbarisms, 
identities or this globe, 
deaths, past, 
vast and 
And them and 
</center>
|-
| <center>each 4th word, offset -3</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -2</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -1</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset 0</center>
|}

=== Worlds ===
Guessing that "words" could be a misspelling, simply trying to browse to http://hiredark.com/worlds/ revealed that this opens a page as well; a page with a pure black background and nothing else in it.

Either once this link was posted in the Cyan forums (assuming Cyan employees watching the progress in the thread) - or by simply refreshing the content of the browser (assuming there is some automated mechanism updating content) - had the effect that the page now contained a small circle. This circle was an image named "worlds.png" (circle color = #667766). It had already been observed that the dot-color of Cyan's logo had slightly changed from a bright cyan (#00d8ff) to a color with hex value #667766.

The content of the page worlds changed again almost immediately; this time the color of the circle changed was #637777, and the png image was replaced by an svg version. This change coincided with an identical change in the color of the dot in the Cyan logo. The color of both dots then changed again, this time to #55557A.

After the four portions of the Walt Whitman poem were discovered, a discrepancy was noted in the /words/name/ portion of the poetry. Where the word "worlds" should have appeared, there was instead the word "shades" (see above table). Upon attempting the url http://www.hiredark.com/worlds/shades/ , yet another page was discovered which had not one but four circles, each in a different color corresponding to one of the previous color values of the Cyan dot.

In the next few days the color changed multiple times, and with each change a new circle was added for a total of nine circles arranged vertically. The colors of these have hex values of #667766, #637777, #55557A, #333371, #445844, #729999, #888862, #114F11, and #222264. The newest circle always matched the colors that have appeared on the /worlds/ page and also the color of the Cyan logo dot.

The hex value for each color contains four identical digits and two that don't match. The non-matching digits are always a valid ASCII identifier for a letter. In order of appearance, these are 77=w, 63=c, 7A=z, 71=q, 58=X, 72=r, 62=b, 4F=O, 64=d. The four matching digits from each color are distinct values 1-9, suggesting an order in which they should be placed. When arranged in ascending numerical sequence by these digits, rather than by chronological appearance, the letters form the string "OdqXzwcbr". If entered as as part of the url it gives http://hiredark.com/OdqXzwcbr which at first was a blank page but now redirects to http://obduct.me

== Obduct.me ==
http://obduct.me consisted of the Cyan logo, in SVG form, on a black background. After the nine color changes (see above) the Cyan dot reverted to its original color and the C portion of the logo began to undergo similar color changes. The hex value of the first color was 6F7262, which is ASCII for "orb". Noticing that http://obduct.me/orb is an existing (only Forbidden) page, and assuming a similar pattern as before with using prominent words from Kickstarter updates, led to http://obduct.me/orb/scatter, which displays the single word "Karl". The page corresponds to a Cyan clue for <C1>/<Update #13>. 

The color of the C changed several more times. Following the above pattern, these led to the following pages with a single word of text: 

<C1>/<Update #13> with #6F7262="orb", so [http://obduct.me/orb/scatter orb/scatter], "Karl" 

<C2>/<Update #15> with #746F70="top", so [http://obduct.me/top/reward top/reward], "moved" 

<C3>/<Update #16> with #6C6970="lip", so [http://obduct.me/lip/officially lip/officially], "away" 

<C4>/<Update #18> with #626F77="bow", so [http://obduct.me/bow/disc bow/disc], "<today>" 

Note that the final clue was received via Cyan.com 's News page on Nov. 11, 2013. Rather than plain text, a .png image is shown containing <C4>/<Update#18> under a post heading of "Welcome". Further exploration revealed a new directory on the cyan.com domain of cyan.com/welcome . This leads to a page with comparable formatting to the Cyan News page but without any other posts. The .png hint image is there as well.

In the forum comments discussing these clues, some text was changed (presumably by a moderator). One set of changes, in red color, indicated that Cyan had given an official <C3>/<Update #16> clue (previously it had been successful guesswork). A second set of changes highlighted words or letters in blue, ostensibly to draw attention to them. These included "<today>" (quote marks only), the individual letters g-o-o-g-l-e in a series of consecutive posts, and "November 11" (including quotes and text).

== Sites to Watch for Clues ==

[http://obductiongame.com/ OBDUCTION website] (in the video)

[https://www.facebook.com/CyanGames Cyan's Facebook Page]

[http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/ Reddit]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts Obduction Kickstarter Updates]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/cyaninc/comments Cyan Comments on Kickstarter]

[https://twitter.com/cyanworlds Cyan on Twitter]

[https://twitter.com/ryanwarzecha/ Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) on Twitter]

[http://cyan.com/ Cyan website]

[https://www.pinterest.com/cyaninc/ Cyan on Pinterest]

[https://mobile.twitter.com/obduction Obduction on Twitter]

== All Cyan Posts ==

A reference section, these are all posts by Cyanists leading up to and throughout the Kickstarter campaign. This might give some clues on how they think and where their posts might appear. Also, some of the clues might still be relevant to later puzzles. Unless otherwise stated, all of the posts & statements quoted below are from the [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28 Looking Forward to that Kickstarter ;)] thread on the Cyan forums.

Sep 10: Eric A Anderson (edoublea) [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151380233143078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page under “Photos of Cyan Inc.” with the comment, "...I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, and I must admit however, such conjecture is futile..." Ainia speculates it has something to do with an outside project of Eric's, The Witness. edoublea replies, "Nope. Think '''FARTHER'''." Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=405#p405 posts], "However Montana has some nice trees, ever think of looking over there?" greydragon will later [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=664#p664 post] "Montana means nothing - The quote on the first one has nothing to do with this game... We just wanted you to read it all the way through and say... 'the ending has not yet been written'"

Sep 15: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151391065353078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page with the comment, "Unbounded in its ken..." Zardoz [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=495#p495 posts] "The quote is from a Robert Gambol poem (The Beauties of the Universe, 1732, partially reproduced below):"

Sep 16: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=528#p528 posts], "Unbounded in its ken, from prison free / Will clearly view what here we darkly see: / Those planetary worlds, and thousands more, / Now veil’d from human sight, it shall explore." and "Maybe there are more levels to this than you know." with the word "levels" fading in color. Zardoz speculates "I think the point of "levels" is the shades of grey - which is to say that eaa is telling us the poem itself is important" and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=533#p533 replies], "Perhaps. Or maybe you need to make an adjustment to your thinking."

Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=538#p538 posts an image] which, after various image processing things with the exposure and contrast, reveals hidden letters.

Samsbase wonders about the first image and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=546#p546 replies] "Or maybe.... just maybe... eaa didn't embed anything in the first one, because he didn't realize people wanted so desperately to FIND things, and has since remedied that with the follow-ups. But you can keep digging, if you really want to." all in tiny font except for the "keep digging." This turns out to be simply a reference to planting seeds.

Sep 17: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151393080463078&id=9225241363 posts] an image on Cyan's Facebook page with the comment, "...and each step will be made in the wink of an eye." which is from The Wizard of Oz. Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=548#p548 posts] the quote.

edoublea [http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/1mk5wk/cyan_dropping_new_image_hints/ posts] on Reddit: "A wild clue has appeared! http://imgur.com/7KujlVh Enjoy. ;}" and greydragon posts on his personal Facebook page, "Reddit is fun ;)" Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=590#p590 posts] about these and begins the speculation. Madhatt3r deciphers the wingdings in the image to read "walking shark" and Rehvaro [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=597#p597 posts] "Why a Stegosaurus ? Why a Graph ? Why "No!" ? Maybe it's a "rebus": Stego + No! + Graph = Steganography ?" Several people try different things with stenography sites, but get nowhere. Zib figures out that "walking shark" means mobilefish.com, tries the image there and gets [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=632#p632 an image of a seed] with the words, "Prepate to be scattered." edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=644#p644 posts], "Dang it. That's what I get for not spell-checking my ominous clues before cryptographically encoding them in abstact sneak-peek images. I promus to spel bettr next tyme."

Madhatt3r [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=673#p673 posts] an image of the two images together which appears to be a plant sprouting from a seed.

Sep 28: <@LemonLime> (Eric) posts in Cyan Chat: "x6yoZIW Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains." Ahlisendar [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=845#p845 posts the image] and Buzzle1 [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=846#p846 posts] an excerpt from The Road by Cormac McCarthy which includes the quote posted by LemonLime as well as "Maps and mazes."

Oct 2: [http://www.inlander.com/spokane/writing-the-next-age/Content?oid=2194852 Inlander article about Myst 20th Anniversary] mentions Cyan's plans to launch a Kickstarter soon and Rand offers the teaser, "A white picket fence and an old farmhouse on a strange and alien world, without explanation for how they arrived."

Oct 5: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=914#p914 posts] "Since everyone gave up... http://www.devfarm.it/steganography/" The players now try the images and various passwords in this site, but without luck.

Oct 6: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=924#p924 posts] that the site doesn't seem to be working, apologizes and gives the answer: "The password was "mazes", from that Cormac McCarthy quote. Rather than watch everyone fight with a broken PHP error, I'm just going to leave the decrypted payload image right here...http://imgur.com/PR0LeZP"

Oct 6: LemonLime posts in CyanChat: "/a/JJNoN I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along." Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=928#p928 posts] the image and an excerpt from "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard which includes the line quoted by LemonLime as well as the word, "imperfections" which was the key Zib used with mobilefish to find a new [http://i.imgur.com/zCDTvtZ.jpg image] which appeared to be a Magic Eye puzzle. The players were able to see letters in the image and finally work out "ODUCTiN." Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=947#p947 posts] that his brother remembered something Rand said at Mysterium 2009: "…there was a project called Abduction which was more of a single player game..."

Oct 10: Shahneer [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=989#p989 posts] about discovering an image with the word "Obduction" on the DRC site.
Oct 12: WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1023#p1023 posts] a partial image of what he captured from the DRC site.

Oct 13: Buzzle1 discovers [http://redditmetrics.com/r/Obduction] which links to a [http://www.reddit.com/r/Obduction/comments/1odh0k/you_guys_waste_no_time/ post on Reddit] by edoublea: "You guys waste no time. And for that, your reward: http://i.imgur.com/oRTaRx3.jpg"

Oct 14: Trekluver posts a link to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obduction Obduction wikipedia article] and WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1052#p1052 posts] the full image of what he captured from the DRC site. andys1376 discovers the [http://obductiongame.com/ Obduction website]

Oct 15: Chogon [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1068&f=5#p1068 posts] an announcement about an upcoming forum outage and update which includes the line, "And 3) I hope this doesn't interfere with the timing of the … what's that? Gotta go."

Oct 16: rivenwanderer discovers an [https://twitter.com/obduction Obduction Twitter account].

Obduction ARG

2013-11-12T23:00:39Z

Ccstat: /* Obduct.me */ added blue text hints from forum

== Obduction Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Progress ==

In late August, Cyan Worlds, Inc. began releasing hints and clues to what would later be revealed to be their new game project, Obduction. Prior to the Kickstarter campaign, several images were teased in encrypted form. These images were mostly screenshots from the then-unreleased Kickstarter trailer and included letters from the name Obduction, hinting at the title. (See the "All Cyan Posts" section below for specifics). 
With the beginning of the Kickstarter campaign, Cyan released clues through the kickstarter material and surrounding promotional activity that have so far led to several websites. This segment of the ARG is ongoing, discussed actively in the [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28 Kickstarter thread] on the Cyan forums. Broadly, clues in the kickstarter video led to a website called hiredark.com, which has several sub-directories with various clues. These clues have since led to the site obduct.me.

== Kickstarter Video ==

During the Kickstarter video for the game, three words are displayed.

* 3:20 - yellowbrick
* 3:23 - firelight
* 4:05 - germinate

When these words are typed into posts at the Cyan forums, the ("swear-word") filter changes the words to:

* yellowbrick: is.gd
* firelight: odu
* germinate: tol

This was found to be a short URL link: http://is.gd/odutol

The shortlink led to a YouTube video with the title ''4/3 π r3'', uploaded by user ''Chester C''.

The title of the video is the formula for finding the volume of a sphere. The video is three seconds long, cycling through images of different round or spherical objects. The audio of the video (a series of high-pitched beeping sounds) was found to contain a [http://www.texturu.org/share/images/cyan-qr.jpg QR Code] leading to the site http://hiredark.com.

== Hiredark ==
The site hiredark.com simulates the appearance of a Linux/Unix shell (terminal) running a count-down timer. The timer is scripted in (dynamic) PHP, which generates a Javascript script. The units of the timer appear to be milliseconds, and the timer itself appears to be counting down to January 6, 2014. In addition, the script is coded to display the message "You do not have sufficient permission to cancel this process." if the user attempts to "end" the counter from the simulated command line using the key combination CTRL+C.

=== Words ===
In their [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/648330 Kickstarter Update #12] Cyan gave a hint at the bottom of the update: '''"/words/<AMA>"'''. By appending the hiredark URL with "/words/", it was found that http://hiredark.com/words/ is a valid page, but no access granted.

Having a look again to the [http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ozzcx/rand_miller_here_cocreator_of_myst_riven_got_a/ reddit AMA page], it was suspicious that Rand Miller used the word "swell" really often in his welcome message. Adding "swell" to the URL again gave a valid page http://hiredark.com/words/swell/ which contains the text of an apparently "nonsense" poem. Searching for the text of the strange poem using a search engine revealed that the text was derived from the poetry of Walt Whitman, specifically the poem [http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/on_the_beach_at_night_alone.html "On the Beach at Night Alone"]. As one can see, every fourth word from this poem is used to derive the Cyan versions of it.

The following day, Rand fave a hint in an [http://www.twitch.tv/ingamechat/b/476050041 In-Game Chat interview] ("'''/words/<update#6>'''"), and a new page was found, http://hiredark.com/words/surprise/. These words are also every fourth word of the Whitman poem, but with an offset of -1 compared to the /swell words (that is, each word in /surprise is the word in Whitman just before the word used in /swell.)

Following the pattern of looking for prominent or frequently-used words in the updates, two additional pages were discovered, at [http://www.hiredark.com/words/add-on/ words/add-on] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/640239 update #7])and [http://www.hiredark.com/words/name/ words/name] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/646673 update #11]). These pages contained the rest of the words to the Whitman poem, with an offset of -3 and -2 respectively from the first page discovered.

After reconstructing the poem through these pages, it was discovered that one word was different from the original - "shades" instead of "worlds" in verse 8.

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Whitman's "On the Beach at Night Alone"
|-
|
:On the ''beach'' '''at''' night alone, 
:''As'' '''the''' old mother ''sways'' '''her''' to and ''fro'' '''singing''' her husky ''song,'' 
:'''As''' I watch ''the'' '''bright''' stars shining, ''I'' '''think''' a thought ''of'' '''the''' clef of ''the'' '''universes''' and of ''the'' '''future.''' 
: 
:A vast ''similitude'' '''interlocks''' all, 
:All ''spheres,'' '''grown,''' ungrown, small, ''large,'' '''suns,''' moons, planets, 
:''All'' '''distances''' of place ''however'' '''wide,''' 
:All distances ''of'' '''time,''' all inanimate ''forms,'' 
:'''All''' souls, all ''living'' '''bodies''' though they ''be'' '''ever''' so different, ''or'' '''in''' different worlds, 
:''All'' '''gaseous,''' watery, vegetable, ''mineral'' '''processes,''' the fishes, ''the'' '''brutes,''' 
:All nations, ''colors,'' '''barbarisms,''' civilizations, languages, 
:''All'' '''identities''' that have ''existed'' '''or''' may exist ''on'' '''this''' globe, or ''any'' '''globe,''' 
:All lives ''and'' '''deaths,''' all of ''the'' '''past,''' present, future, 
:''This'' '''vast''' similitude spans ''them,'' '''and''' always has ''spann'd,'' 
:'''And''' shall forever ''span'' '''them''' and compactly ''hold'' '''and''' enclose them. 
|}

(The bold and italic faces only emphasize the connections between the versions, and are not original to the Whitman poem.)

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! hiredark.com/words/add-on/
! hiredark.com/words/name/
! hiredark.com/words/surprise
! hiredark.com/words/swell
|-
|
On night 
old to her 
I stars a clef and 
 
A all, 
ungrown, moons, 
of 
All all 
souls, though so different 
watery, the 
All civilizations, 
that may globe, 
All all present, 
similitude always 
shall and enclose 
|
<center>
the alone, 
mother and husky 
watch shining, thought of of 
 
vast 
All small, planets, 
place 
distances inanimate 
all they different, '''shades,''' 
vegetable, fishes, 
nations, languages, 
have exist, or 
lives of future, 
spans has 
forever compactly them. 
</center>
|
beach 
As sways fro, song, 
the I of the the 
 
similitude 
spheres, large, 
All however 
of forms, 
living be or 
All mineral the 
colors, 
All existed, on any 
and the 
This them, spann'd, 
span hold 
|
<center>
at 
the her singing 
As bright think the universes, future. 
 
interlocks 
grown, suns, 
distances wide, 
time, 
All bodies, ever in 
gaseous, processes, brutes, 
barbarisms, 
identities or this globe, 
deaths, past, 
vast and 
And them and 
</center>
|-
| <center>each 4th word, offset -3</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -2</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -1</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset 0</center>
|}

=== Worlds ===
Guessing that "words" could be a misspelling, simply trying to browse to http://hiredark.com/worlds/ revealed that this opens a page as well; a page with a pure black background and nothing else in it.

Either once this link was posted in the Cyan forums (assuming Cyan employees watching the progress in the thread) - or by simply refreshing the content of the browser (assuming there is some automated mechanism updating content) - had the effect that the page now contained a small circle. This circle was an image named "worlds.png" (circle color = #667766). It had already been observed that the dot-color of Cyan's logo had slightly changed from a bright cyan (#00d8ff) to a color with hex value #667766.

The content of the page worlds changed again almost immediately; this time the color of the circle changed was #637777, and the png image was replaced by an svg version. This change coincided with an identical change in the color of the dot in the Cyan logo. The color of both dots then changed again, this time to #55557A.

After the four portions of the Walt Whitman poem were discovered, a discrepancy was noted in the /words/name/ portion of the poetry. Where the word "worlds" should have appeared, there was instead the word "shades" (see above table). Upon attempting the url http://www.hiredark.com/worlds/shades/ , yet another page was discovered which had not one but four circles, each in a different color corresponding to one of the previous color values of the Cyan dot.

In the next few days the color changed multiple times, and with each change a new circle was added for a total of nine circles arranged vertically. The colors of these have hex values of #667766, #637777, #55557A, #333371, #445844, #729999, #888862, #114F11, and #222264. The newest circle always matched the colors that have appeared on the /worlds/ page and also the color of the Cyan logo dot.

The hex value for each color contains four identical digits and two that don't match. The non-matching digits are always a valid ASCII identifier for a letter. In order of appearance, these are 77=w, 63=c, 7A=z, 71=q, 58=X, 72=r, 62=b, 4F=O, 64=d. The four matching digits from each color are distinct values 1-9, suggesting an order in which they should be placed. When arranged in ascending numerical sequence by these digits, rather than by chronological appearance, the letters form the string "OdqXzwcbr". If entered as as part of the url it gives http://hiredark.com/OdqXzwcbr which at first was a blank page but now redirects to http://obduct.me

== Obduct.me ==
http://obduct.me consisted of the Cyan logo, in SVG form, on a black background. After the nine color changes (see above) the Cyan dot reverted to its original color and the C portion of the logo began to undergo similar color changes. The hex value of the first color was 6F7262, which is ASCII for "orb". Noticing that http://obduct.me/orb is an existing (only Forbidden) page, and assuming a similar pattern as before with using prominent words from Kickstarter updates, led to http://obduct.me/orb/scatter, which displays the single word "Karl". The page corresponds to a Cyan clue for <C1>/<Update #13>. 

The color of the C changed several more times. Following the above pattern, these led to the following pages with a single word of text: 

<C1>/<Update #13> with #6F7262="orb", so [http://obduct.me/orb/scatter orb/scatter], "Karl" 

<C2>/<Update #15> with #746F70="top", so [http://obduct.me/top/reward top/reward], "moved" 

<C3>/<Update #16> with #6C6970="lip", so [http://obduct.me/lip/officially lip/officially], "away" 

<C4>/<Update #18> with #626F77="bow", so [http://obduct.me/bow/disc bow/disc], "<today>" 

Note that the final clue was received via Cyan.com 's News page on Nov. 11, 2013. Rather than plain text, a .png image is shown containing <C4>/<Update#18> under a post heading of "Welcome". Further exploration revealed a new directory on the cyan.com domain of cyan.com/welcome . This leads to a page with comparable formatting to the Cyan News page but without any other posts. The .png hint image is there as well.

In the forum comments discussing these clues, some text was changed (presumably by a moderator). One set of changes, in red color, indicated that Cyan had given an official <C3>/<Update #16> clue (previously it had been successful guesswork). A second set of changes highlighted words or letters in blue, ostensibly to draw attention to them. These included "<today>" (quote marks only), the individual letters g-o-o-g-l-e in a series of consecutive posts, and "11 November" (including quotes and text).

== Sites to Watch for Clues ==

[http://obductiongame.com/ OBDUCTION website] (in the video)

[https://www.facebook.com/CyanGames Cyan's Facebook Page]

[http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/ Reddit]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts Obduction Kickstarter Updates]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/cyaninc/comments Cyan Comments on Kickstarter]

[https://twitter.com/cyanworlds Cyan on Twitter]

[https://twitter.com/ryanwarzecha/ Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) on Twitter]

[http://cyan.com/ Cyan website]

[https://www.pinterest.com/cyaninc/ Cyan on Pinterest]

[https://mobile.twitter.com/obduction Obduction on Twitter]

== All Cyan Posts ==

A reference section, these are all posts by Cyanists leading up to and throughout the Kickstarter campaign. This might give some clues on how they think and where their posts might appear. Also, some of the clues might still be relevant to later puzzles. Unless otherwise stated, all of the posts & statements quoted below are from the [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28 Looking Forward to that Kickstarter ;)] thread on the Cyan forums.

Sep 10: Eric A Anderson (edoublea) [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151380233143078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page under “Photos of Cyan Inc.” with the comment, "...I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, and I must admit however, such conjecture is futile..." Ainia speculates it has something to do with an outside project of Eric's, The Witness. edoublea replies, "Nope. Think '''FARTHER'''." Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=405#p405 posts], "However Montana has some nice trees, ever think of looking over there?" greydragon will later [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=664#p664 post] "Montana means nothing - The quote on the first one has nothing to do with this game... We just wanted you to read it all the way through and say... 'the ending has not yet been written'"

Sep 15: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151391065353078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page with the comment, "Unbounded in its ken..." Zardoz [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=495#p495 posts] "The quote is from a Robert Gambol poem (The Beauties of the Universe, 1732, partially reproduced below):"

Sep 16: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=528#p528 posts], "Unbounded in its ken, from prison free / Will clearly view what here we darkly see: / Those planetary worlds, and thousands more, / Now veil’d from human sight, it shall explore." and "Maybe there are more levels to this than you know." with the word "levels" fading in color. Zardoz speculates "I think the point of "levels" is the shades of grey - which is to say that eaa is telling us the poem itself is important" and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=533#p533 replies], "Perhaps. Or maybe you need to make an adjustment to your thinking."

Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=538#p538 posts an image] which, after various image processing things with the exposure and contrast, reveals hidden letters.

Samsbase wonders about the first image and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=546#p546 replies] "Or maybe.... just maybe... eaa didn't embed anything in the first one, because he didn't realize people wanted so desperately to FIND things, and has since remedied that with the follow-ups. But you can keep digging, if you really want to." all in tiny font except for the "keep digging." This turns out to be simply a reference to planting seeds.

Sep 17: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151393080463078&id=9225241363 posts] an image on Cyan's Facebook page with the comment, "...and each step will be made in the wink of an eye." which is from The Wizard of Oz. Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=548#p548 posts] the quote.

edoublea [http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/1mk5wk/cyan_dropping_new_image_hints/ posts] on Reddit: "A wild clue has appeared! http://imgur.com/7KujlVh Enjoy. ;}" and greydragon posts on his personal Facebook page, "Reddit is fun ;)" Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=590#p590 posts] about these and begins the speculation. Madhatt3r deciphers the wingdings in the image to read "walking shark" and Rehvaro [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=597#p597 posts] "Why a Stegosaurus ? Why a Graph ? Why "No!" ? Maybe it's a "rebus": Stego + No! + Graph = Steganography ?" Several people try different things with stenography sites, but get nowhere. Zib figures out that "walking shark" means mobilefish.com, tries the image there and gets [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=632#p632 an image of a seed] with the words, "Prepate to be scattered." edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=644#p644 posts], "Dang it. That's what I get for not spell-checking my ominous clues before cryptographically encoding them in abstact sneak-peek images. I promus to spel bettr next tyme."

Madhatt3r [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=673#p673 posts] an image of the two images together which appears to be a plant sprouting from a seed.

Sep 28: <@LemonLime> (Eric) posts in Cyan Chat: "x6yoZIW Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains." Ahlisendar [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=845#p845 posts the image] and Buzzle1 [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=846#p846 posts] an excerpt from The Road by Cormac McCarthy which includes the quote posted by LemonLime as well as "Maps and mazes."

Oct 2: [http://www.inlander.com/spokane/writing-the-next-age/Content?oid=2194852 Inlander article about Myst 20th Anniversary] mentions Cyan's plans to launch a Kickstarter soon and Rand offers the teaser, "A white picket fence and an old farmhouse on a strange and alien world, without explanation for how they arrived."

Oct 5: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=914#p914 posts] "Since everyone gave up... http://www.devfarm.it/steganography/" The players now try the images and various passwords in this site, but without luck.

Oct 6: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=924#p924 posts] that the site doesn't seem to be working, apologizes and gives the answer: "The password was "mazes", from that Cormac McCarthy quote. Rather than watch everyone fight with a broken PHP error, I'm just going to leave the decrypted payload image right here...http://imgur.com/PR0LeZP"

Oct 6: LemonLime posts in CyanChat: "/a/JJNoN I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along." Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=928#p928 posts] the image and an excerpt from "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard which includes the line quoted by LemonLime as well as the word, "imperfections" which was the key Zib used with mobilefish to find a new [http://i.imgur.com/zCDTvtZ.jpg image] which appeared to be a Magic Eye puzzle. The players were able to see letters in the image and finally work out "ODUCTiN." Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=947#p947 posts] that his brother remembered something Rand said at Mysterium 2009: "…there was a project called Abduction which was more of a single player game..."

Oct 10: Shahneer [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=989#p989 posts] about discovering an image with the word "Obduction" on the DRC site.
Oct 12: WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1023#p1023 posts] a partial image of what he captured from the DRC site.

Oct 13: Buzzle1 discovers [http://redditmetrics.com/r/Obduction] which links to a [http://www.reddit.com/r/Obduction/comments/1odh0k/you_guys_waste_no_time/ post on Reddit] by edoublea: "You guys waste no time. And for that, your reward: http://i.imgur.com/oRTaRx3.jpg"

Oct 14: Trekluver posts a link to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obduction Obduction wikipedia article] and WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1052#p1052 posts] the full image of what he captured from the DRC site. andys1376 discovers the [http://obductiongame.com/ Obduction website]

Oct 15: Chogon [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1068&f=5#p1068 posts] an announcement about an upcoming forum outage and update which includes the line, "And 3) I hope this doesn't interfere with the timing of the … what's that? Gotta go."

Oct 16: rivenwanderer discovers an [https://twitter.com/obduction Obduction Twitter account].

Obduction ARG

2013-11-11T15:18:21Z

Ccstat: /* Obduct.me */ added 4th color change

== Obduction Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Progress ==

In late August, Cyan Worlds, Inc. began releasing hints and clues to what would later be revealed to be their new game project, Obduction. Prior to the Kickstarter campaign, several images were teased in encrypted form. These images were mostly screenshots from the then-unreleased Kickstarter trailer and included letters from the name Obduction, hinting at the title. (See the "All Cyan Posts" section below for specifics). 
With the beginning of the Kickstarter campaign, Cyan released clues through the kickstarter material and surrounding promotional activity that have so far led to several websites. This segment of the ARG is ongoing. Broadly, clues in the kickstarter video led to a website called hiredark.com, which has several sub-directories with various clues. These clues have since led to the site obduct.me.

== Kickstarter Video ==

During the Kickstarter video for the game, three words are displayed.

* 3:20 - yellowbrick
* 3:23 - firelight
* 4:05 - germinate

When these words are typed into posts at the Cyan forums, the ("swear-word") filter changes the words to:

* yellowbrick: is.gd
* firelight: odu
* germinate: tol

This was found to be a short URL link: http://is.gd/odutol

The shortlink led to a YouTube video with the title ''4/3 π r3'', uploaded by user ''Chester C''.

The title of the video is the formula for finding the volume of a sphere. The video is three seconds long, cycling through images of different round or spherical objects. The audio of the video (a series of high-pitched beeping sounds) was found to contain a [http://www.texturu.org/share/images/cyan-qr.jpg QR Code] leading to the site http://hiredark.com.

== Hiredark ==
The site hiredark.com simulates the appearance of a Linux/Unix shell (terminal) running a count-down timer. The timer is scripted in (dynamic) PHP, which generates a Javascript script. The units of the timer appear to be milliseconds, and the timer itself appears to be counting down to January 6, 2014. In addition, the script is coded to display the message "You do not have sufficient permission to cancel this process." if the user attempts to "end" the counter from the simulated command line using the key combination CTRL+C.

=== Words ===
In their [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/648330 Kickstarter Update #12] Cyan gave a hint at the bottom of the update: '''"/words/<AMA>"'''. By appending the hiredark URL with "/words/", it was found that http://hiredark.com/words/ is a valid page, but no access granted.

Having a look again to the [http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ozzcx/rand_miller_here_cocreator_of_myst_riven_got_a/ reddit AMA page], it was suspicious that Rand Miller used the word "swell" really often in his welcome message. Adding "swell" to the URL again gave a valid page http://hiredark.com/words/swell/ which contains the text of an apparently "nonsense" poem. Searching for the text of the strange poem using a search engine revealed that the text was derived from the poetry of Walt Whitman, specifically the poem [http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/on_the_beach_at_night_alone.html "On the Beach at Night Alone"]. As one can see, every fourth word from this poem is used to derive the Cyan versions of it.

The following day, Rand fave a hint in an [http://www.twitch.tv/ingamechat/b/476050041 In-Game Chat interview] ("'''/words/<update#6>'''"), and a new page was found, http://hiredark.com/words/surprise/. These words are also every fourth word of the Whitman poem, but with an offset of -1 compared to the /swell words (that is, each word in /surprise is the word in Whitman just before the word used in /swell.)

Following the pattern of looking for prominent or frequently-used words in the updates, two additional pages were discovered, at [http://www.hiredark.com/words/add-on/ words/add-on] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/640239 update #7])and [http://www.hiredark.com/words/name/ words/name] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/646673 update #11]). These pages contained the rest of the words to the Whitman poem, with an offset of -3 and -2 respectively from the first page discovered.

After reconstructing the poem through these pages, it was discovered that one word was different from the original - "shades" instead of "worlds" in verse 8.

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Whitman's "On the Beach at Night Alone"
|-
|
:On the ''beach'' '''at''' night alone, 
:''As'' '''the''' old mother ''sways'' '''her''' to and ''fro'' '''singing''' her husky ''song,'' 
:'''As''' I watch ''the'' '''bright''' stars shining, ''I'' '''think''' a thought ''of'' '''the''' clef of ''the'' '''universes''' and of ''the'' '''future.''' 
: 
:A vast ''similitude'' '''interlocks''' all, 
:All ''spheres,'' '''grown,''' ungrown, small, ''large,'' '''suns,''' moons, planets, 
:''All'' '''distances''' of place ''however'' '''wide,''' 
:All distances ''of'' '''time,''' all inanimate ''forms,'' 
:'''All''' souls, all ''living'' '''bodies''' though they ''be'' '''ever''' so different, ''or'' '''in''' different worlds, 
:''All'' '''gaseous,''' watery, vegetable, ''mineral'' '''processes,''' the fishes, ''the'' '''brutes,''' 
:All nations, ''colors,'' '''barbarisms,''' civilizations, languages, 
:''All'' '''identities''' that have ''existed'' '''or''' may exist ''on'' '''this''' globe, or ''any'' '''globe,''' 
:All lives ''and'' '''deaths,''' all of ''the'' '''past,''' present, future, 
:''This'' '''vast''' similitude spans ''them,'' '''and''' always has ''spann'd,'' 
:'''And''' shall forever ''span'' '''them''' and compactly ''hold'' '''and''' enclose them. 
|}

(The bold and italic faces only emphasize the connections between the versions, and are not original to the Whitman poem.)

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! hiredark.com/words/add-on/
! hiredark.com/words/name/
! hiredark.com/words/surprise
! hiredark.com/words/swell
|-
|
On night 
old to her 
I stars a clef and 
 
A all, 
ungrown, moons, 
of 
All all 
souls, though so different 
watery, the 
All civilizations, 
that may globe, 
All all present, 
similitude always 
shall and enclose 
|
<center>
the alone, 
mother and husky 
watch shining, thought of of 
 
vast 
All small, planets, 
place 
distances inanimate 
all they different, '''shades,''' 
vegetable, fishes, 
nations, languages, 
have exist, or 
lives of future, 
spans has 
forever compactly them. 
</center>
|
beach 
As sways fro, song, 
the I of the the 
 
similitude 
spheres, large, 
All however 
of forms, 
living be or 
All mineral the 
colors, 
All existed, on any 
and the 
This them, spann'd, 
span hold 
|
<center>
at 
the her singing 
As bright think the universes, future. 
 
interlocks 
grown, suns, 
distances wide, 
time, 
All bodies, ever in 
gaseous, processes, brutes, 
barbarisms, 
identities or this globe, 
deaths, past, 
vast and 
And them and 
</center>
|-
| <center>each 4th word, offset -3</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -2</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -1</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset 0</center>
|}

=== Worlds ===
Guessing that "words" could be a misspelling, simply trying to browse to http://hiredark.com/worlds/ revealed that this opens a page as well; a page with a pure black background and nothing else in it.

Either once this link was posted in the Cyan forums (assuming Cyan employees watching the progress in the thread) - or by simply refreshing the content of the browser (assuming there is some automated mechanism updating content) - had the effect that the page now contained a small circle. This circle was an image named "worlds.png" (circle color = #667766). It had already been observed that the dot-color of Cyan's logo had slightly changed from a bright cyan (#00d8ff) to a color with hex value #667766.

The content of the page worlds changed again almost immediately; this time the color of the circle changed was #637777, and the png image was replaced by an svg version. This change coincided with an identical change in the color of the dot in the Cyan logo. The color of both dots then changed again, this time to #55557A.

After the four portions of the Walt Whitman poem were discovered, a discrepancy was noted in the /words/name/ portion of the poetry. Where the word "worlds" should have appeared, there was instead the word "shades" (see above table). Upon attempting the url http://www.hiredark.com/worlds/shades/ , yet another page was discovered which had not one but four circles, each in a different color corresponding to one of the previous color values of the Cyan dot.

In the next few days the color changed multiple times, and with each change a new circle was added for a total of nine circles arranged vertically. The colors of these have hex values of #667766, #637777, #55557A, #333371, #445844, #729999, #888862, #114F11, and #222264. The newest circle always matched the colors that have appeared on the /worlds/ page and also the color of the Cyan logo dot.

The hex value for each color contains four identical digits and two that don't match. The non-matching digits are always a valid ASCII identifier for a letter. In order of appearance, these are 77=w, 63=c, 7A=z, 71=q, 58=X, 72=r, 62=b, 4F=O, 64=d. The four matching digits from each color are distinct values 1-9, suggesting an order in which they should be placed. When arranged in ascending numerical sequence by these digits, rather than by chronological appearance, the letters form the string "OdqXzwcbr". If entered as as part of the url it gives http://hiredark.com/OdqXzwcbr which at first was a blank page but now redirects to http://obduct.me

== Obduct.me ==
http://obduct.me consisted of the Cyan logo, in SVG form, on a black background. After the nine color changes (see above) the Cyan dot reverted to its original color and the C portion of the logo began to undergo similar color changes. The hex value of the first color was 6F7262, which is ASCII for "orb". Noticing that http://obduct.me/orb is an existing (only Forbidden) page, and assuming a similar pattern as before with using prominent words from Kickstarter updates, led to http://obduct.me/orb/scatter, which displays the single word "Karl". The page corresponds to a Cyan clue for <C1>/<Update #13>. 

The color of the C changed several more times. Following the above pattern, these led to the following pages with a single word of text: 

<C1>/<Update #13> with #6F7262="orb", so [http://obduct.me/orb/scatter orb/scatter], "Karl" 

<C2>/<Update #15> with #746F70="top", so [http://obduct.me/top/reward top/reward], "moved" 

<C3>/<Update #16> with #6C6970="lip", so [http://obduct.me/lip/officially lip/officially], "away" 

<C3>/<Update #16> with #626F77="bow", so [http://obduct.me/bow/disc bow/disc], "<today>" 

== Sites to Watch for Clues ==

[http://obductiongame.com/ OBDUCTION website] (in the video)

[https://www.facebook.com/CyanGames Cyan's Facebook Page]

[http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/ Reddit]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts Obduction Kickstarter Updates]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/cyaninc/comments Cyan Comments on Kickstarter]

[https://twitter.com/cyanworlds Cyan on Twitter]

[https://twitter.com/ryanwarzecha/ Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) on Twitter]

[http://cyan.com/ Cyan website]

[https://www.pinterest.com/cyaninc/ Cyan on Pinterest]

[https://mobile.twitter.com/obduction Obduction on Twitter]

== All Cyan Posts ==

A reference section, these are all posts by Cyanists leading up to and throughout the Kickstarter campaign. This might give some clues on how they think and where their posts might appear. Also, some of the clues might still be relevant to later puzzles. Unless otherwise stated, all of the posts & statements quoted below are from the [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28 Looking Forward to that Kickstarter ;)] thread on the Cyan forums.

Sep 10: Eric A Anderson (edoublea) [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151380233143078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page under “Photos of Cyan Inc.” with the comment, "...I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, and I must admit however, such conjecture is futile..." Ainia speculates it has something to do with an outside project of Eric's, The Witness. edoublea replies, "Nope. Think '''FARTHER'''." Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=405#p405 posts], "However Montana has some nice trees, ever think of looking over there?" greydragon will later [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=664#p664 post] "Montana means nothing - The quote on the first one has nothing to do with this game... We just wanted you to read it all the way through and say... 'the ending has not yet been written'"

Sep 15: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151391065353078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page with the comment, "Unbounded in its ken..." Zardoz [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=495#p495 posts] "The quote is from a Robert Gambol poem (The Beauties of the Universe, 1732, partially reproduced below):"

Sep 16: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=528#p528 posts], "Unbounded in its ken, from prison free / Will clearly view what here we darkly see: / Those planetary worlds, and thousands more, / Now veil’d from human sight, it shall explore." and "Maybe there are more levels to this than you know." with the word "levels" fading in color. Zardoz speculates "I think the point of "levels" is the shades of grey - which is to say that eaa is telling us the poem itself is important" and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=533#p533 replies], "Perhaps. Or maybe you need to make an adjustment to your thinking."

Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=538#p538 posts an image] which, after various image processing things with the exposure and contrast, reveals hidden letters.

Samsbase wonders about the first image and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=546#p546 replies] "Or maybe.... just maybe... eaa didn't embed anything in the first one, because he didn't realize people wanted so desperately to FIND things, and has since remedied that with the follow-ups. But you can keep digging, if you really want to." all in tiny font except for the "keep digging." This turns out to be simply a reference to planting seeds.

Sep 17: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151393080463078&id=9225241363 posts] an image on Cyan's Facebook page with the comment, "...and each step will be made in the wink of an eye." which is from The Wizard of Oz. Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=548#p548 posts] the quote.

edoublea [http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/1mk5wk/cyan_dropping_new_image_hints/ posts] on Reddit: "A wild clue has appeared! http://imgur.com/7KujlVh Enjoy. ;}" and greydragon posts on his personal Facebook page, "Reddit is fun ;)" Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=590#p590 posts] about these and begins the speculation. Madhatt3r deciphers the wingdings in the image to read "walking shark" and Rehvaro [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=597#p597 posts] "Why a Stegosaurus ? Why a Graph ? Why "No!" ? Maybe it's a "rebus": Stego + No! + Graph = Steganography ?" Several people try different things with stenography sites, but get nowhere. Zib figures out that "walking shark" means mobilefish.com, tries the image there and gets [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=632#p632 an image of a seed] with the words, "Prepate to be scattered." edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=644#p644 posts], "Dang it. That's what I get for not spell-checking my ominous clues before cryptographically encoding them in abstact sneak-peek images. I promus to spel bettr next tyme."

Madhatt3r [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=673#p673 posts] an image of the two images together which appears to be a plant sprouting from a seed.

Sep 28: <@LemonLime> (Eric) posts in Cyan Chat: "x6yoZIW Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains." Ahlisendar [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=845#p845 posts the image] and Buzzle1 [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=846#p846 posts] an excerpt from The Road by Cormac McCarthy which includes the quote posted by LemonLime as well as "Maps and mazes."

Oct 2: [http://www.inlander.com/spokane/writing-the-next-age/Content?oid=2194852 Inlander article about Myst 20th Anniversary] mentions Cyan's plans to launch a Kickstarter soon and Rand offers the teaser, "A white picket fence and an old farmhouse on a strange and alien world, without explanation for how they arrived."

Oct 5: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=914#p914 posts] "Since everyone gave up... http://www.devfarm.it/steganography/" The players now try the images and various passwords in this site, but without luck.

Oct 6: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=924#p924 posts] that the site doesn't seem to be working, apologizes and gives the answer: "The password was "mazes", from that Cormac McCarthy quote. Rather than watch everyone fight with a broken PHP error, I'm just going to leave the decrypted payload image right here...http://imgur.com/PR0LeZP"

Oct 6: LemonLime posts in CyanChat: "/a/JJNoN I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along." Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=928#p928 posts] the image and an excerpt from "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard which includes the line quoted by LemonLime as well as the word, "imperfections" which was the key Zib used with mobilefish to find a new [http://i.imgur.com/zCDTvtZ.jpg image] which appeared to be a Magic Eye puzzle. The players were able to see letters in the image and finally work out "ODUCTiN." Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=947#p947 posts] that his brother remembered something Rand said at Mysterium 2009: "…there was a project called Abduction which was more of a single player game..."

Oct 10: Shahneer [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=989#p989 posts] about discovering an image with the word "Obduction" on the DRC site.
Oct 12: WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1023#p1023 posts] a partial image of what he captured from the DRC site.

Oct 13: Buzzle1 discovers [http://redditmetrics.com/r/Obduction] which links to a [http://www.reddit.com/r/Obduction/comments/1odh0k/you_guys_waste_no_time/ post on Reddit] by edoublea: "You guys waste no time. And for that, your reward: http://i.imgur.com/oRTaRx3.jpg"

Oct 14: Trekluver posts a link to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obduction Obduction wikipedia article] and WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1052#p1052 posts] the full image of what he captured from the DRC site. andys1376 discovers the [http://obductiongame.com/ Obduction website]

Oct 15: Chogon [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1068&f=5#p1068 posts] an announcement about an upcoming forum outage and update which includes the line, "And 3) I hope this doesn't interfere with the timing of the … what's that? Gotta go."

Oct 16: rivenwanderer discovers an [https://twitter.com/obduction Obduction Twitter account].

Obduction ARG

2013-11-10T23:32:29Z

Ccstat: /* Obduct.me */ fixed a typo

== Obduction Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Progress ==

In late August, Cyan Worlds, Inc. began releasing hints and clues to what would later be revealed to be their new game project, Obduction. Prior to the Kickstarter campaign, several images were teased in encrypted form. These images were mostly screenshots from the then-unreleased Kickstarter trailer and included letters from the name Obduction, hinting at the title. (See the "All Cyan Posts" section below for specifics). 
With the beginning of the Kickstarter campaign, Cyan released clues through the kickstarter material and surrounding promotional activity that have so far led to several websites. This segment of the ARG is ongoing. Broadly, clues in the kickstarter video led to a website called hiredark.com, which has several sub-directories with various clues. These clues have since led to the site obduct.me.

== Kickstarter Video ==

During the Kickstarter video for the game, three words are displayed.

* 3:20 - yellowbrick
* 3:23 - firelight
* 4:05 - germinate

When these words are typed into posts at the Cyan forums, the ("swear-word") filter changes the words to:

* yellowbrick: is.gd
* firelight: odu
* germinate: tol

This was found to be a short URL link: http://is.gd/odutol

The shortlink led to a YouTube video with the title ''4/3 π r3'', uploaded by user ''Chester C''.

The title of the video is the formula for finding the volume of a sphere. The video is three seconds long, cycling through images of different round or spherical objects. The audio of the video (a series of high-pitched beeping sounds) was found to contain a [http://www.texturu.org/share/images/cyan-qr.jpg QR Code] leading to the site http://hiredark.com.

== Hiredark ==
The site hiredark.com simulates the appearance of a Linux/Unix shell (terminal) running a count-down timer. The timer is scripted in (dynamic) PHP, which generates a Javascript script. The units of the timer appear to be milliseconds, and the timer itself appears to be counting down to January 6, 2014. In addition, the script is coded to display the message "You do not have sufficient permission to cancel this process." if the user attempts to "end" the counter from the simulated command line using the key combination CTRL+C.

=== Words ===
In their [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/648330 Kickstarter Update #12] Cyan gave a hint at the bottom of the update: '''"/words/<AMA>"'''. By appending the hiredark URL with "/words/", it was found that http://hiredark.com/words/ is a valid page, but no access granted.

Having a look again to the [http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ozzcx/rand_miller_here_cocreator_of_myst_riven_got_a/ reddit AMA page], it was suspicious that Rand Miller used the word "swell" really often in his welcome message. Adding "swell" to the URL again gave a valid page http://hiredark.com/words/swell/ which contains the text of an apparently "nonsense" poem. Searching for the text of the strange poem using a search engine revealed that the text was derived from the poetry of Walt Whitman, specifically the poem [http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/on_the_beach_at_night_alone.html "On the Beach at Night Alone"]. As one can see, every fourth word from this poem is used to derive the Cyan versions of it.

The following day, Rand fave a hint in an [http://www.twitch.tv/ingamechat/b/476050041 In-Game Chat interview] ("'''/words/<update#6>'''"), and a new page was found, http://hiredark.com/words/surprise/. These words are also every fourth word of the Whitman poem, but with an offset of -1 compared to the /swell words (that is, each word in /surprise is the word in Whitman just before the word used in /swell.)

Following the pattern of looking for prominent or frequently-used words in the updates, two additional pages were discovered, at [http://www.hiredark.com/words/add-on/ words/add-on] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/640239 update #7])and [http://www.hiredark.com/words/name/ words/name] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/646673 update #11]). These pages contained the rest of the words to the Whitman poem, with an offset of -3 and -2 respectively from the first page discovered.

After reconstructing the poem through these pages, it was discovered that one word was different from the original - "shades" instead of "worlds" in verse 8.

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Whitman's "On the Beach at Night Alone"
|-
|
:On the ''beach'' '''at''' night alone, 
:''As'' '''the''' old mother ''sways'' '''her''' to and ''fro'' '''singing''' her husky ''song,'' 
:'''As''' I watch ''the'' '''bright''' stars shining, ''I'' '''think''' a thought ''of'' '''the''' clef of ''the'' '''universes''' and of ''the'' '''future.''' 
: 
:A vast ''similitude'' '''interlocks''' all, 
:All ''spheres,'' '''grown,''' ungrown, small, ''large,'' '''suns,''' moons, planets, 
:''All'' '''distances''' of place ''however'' '''wide,''' 
:All distances ''of'' '''time,''' all inanimate ''forms,'' 
:'''All''' souls, all ''living'' '''bodies''' though they ''be'' '''ever''' so different, ''or'' '''in''' different worlds, 
:''All'' '''gaseous,''' watery, vegetable, ''mineral'' '''processes,''' the fishes, ''the'' '''brutes,''' 
:All nations, ''colors,'' '''barbarisms,''' civilizations, languages, 
:''All'' '''identities''' that have ''existed'' '''or''' may exist ''on'' '''this''' globe, or ''any'' '''globe,''' 
:All lives ''and'' '''deaths,''' all of ''the'' '''past,''' present, future, 
:''This'' '''vast''' similitude spans ''them,'' '''and''' always has ''spann'd,'' 
:'''And''' shall forever ''span'' '''them''' and compactly ''hold'' '''and''' enclose them. 
|}

(The bold and italic faces only emphasize the connections between the versions, and are not original to the Whitman poem.)

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! hiredark.com/words/add-on/
! hiredark.com/words/name/
! hiredark.com/words/surprise
! hiredark.com/words/swell
|-
|
On night 
old to her 
I stars a clef and 
 
A all, 
ungrown, moons, 
of 
All all 
souls, though so different 
watery, the 
All civilizations, 
that may globe, 
All all present, 
similitude always 
shall and enclose 
|
<center>
the alone, 
mother and husky 
watch shining, thought of of 
 
vast 
All small, planets, 
place 
distances inanimate 
all they different, '''shades,''' 
vegetable, fishes, 
nations, languages, 
have exist, or 
lives of future, 
spans has 
forever compactly them. 
</center>
|
beach 
As sways fro, song, 
the I of the the 
 
similitude 
spheres, large, 
All however 
of forms, 
living be or 
All mineral the 
colors, 
All existed, on any 
and the 
This them, spann'd, 
span hold 
|
<center>
at 
the her singing 
As bright think the universes, future. 
 
interlocks 
grown, suns, 
distances wide, 
time, 
All bodies, ever in 
gaseous, processes, brutes, 
barbarisms, 
identities or this globe, 
deaths, past, 
vast and 
And them and 
</center>
|-
| <center>each 4th word, offset -3</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -2</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -1</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset 0</center>
|}

=== Worlds ===
Guessing that "words" could be a misspelling, simply trying to browse to http://hiredark.com/worlds/ revealed that this opens a page as well; a page with a pure black background and nothing else in it.

Either once this link was posted in the Cyan forums (assuming Cyan employees watching the progress in the thread) - or by simply refreshing the content of the browser (assuming there is some automated mechanism updating content) - had the effect that the page now contained a small circle. This circle was an image named "worlds.png" (circle color = #667766). It had already been observed that the dot-color of Cyan's logo had slightly changed from a bright cyan (#00d8ff) to a color with hex value #667766.

The content of the page worlds changed again almost immediately; this time the color of the circle changed was #637777, and the png image was replaced by an svg version. This change coincided with an identical change in the color of the dot in the Cyan logo. The color of both dots then changed again, this time to #55557A.

After the four portions of the Walt Whitman poem were discovered, a discrepancy was noted in the /words/name/ portion of the poetry. Where the word "worlds" should have appeared, there was instead the word "shades" (see above table). Upon attempting the url http://www.hiredark.com/worlds/shades/ , yet another page was discovered which had not one but four circles, each in a different color corresponding to one of the previous color values of the Cyan dot.

In the next few days the color changed multiple times, and with each change a new circle was added for a total of nine circles arranged vertically. The colors of these have hex values of #667766, #637777, #55557A, #333371, #445844, #729999, #888862, #114F11, and #222264. The newest circle always matched the colors that have appeared on the /worlds/ page and also the color of the Cyan logo dot.

The hex value for each color contains four identical digits and two that don't match. The non-matching digits are always a valid ASCII identifier for a letter. In order of appearance, these are 77=w, 63=c, 7A=z, 71=q, 58=X, 72=r, 62=b, 4F=O, 64=d. The four matching digits from each color are distinct values 1-9, suggesting an order in which they should be placed. When arranged in ascending numerical sequence by these digits, rather than by chronological appearance, the letters form the string "OdqXzwcbr". If entered as as part of the url it gives http://hiredark.com/OdqXzwcbr which at first was a blank page but now redirects to http://obduct.me

== Obduct.me ==
http://obduct.me consisted of the Cyan logo, in SVG form, on a black background. After the nine color changes (see above) the Cyan dot reverted to its original color and the C portion of the logo began to undergo similar color changes. The hex value of the first color was 6F7262, which is ASCII for "orb". Noticing that http://obduct.me/orb is an existing (only Forbidden) page, and assuming a similar pattern as before with using prominent words from Kickstarter updates, led to http://obduct.me/orb/scatter, which displays the single word "Karl". The page corresponds to a Cyan clue for <C1>/<Update #13>. 

The color of the C changed several more times. Following the above pattern, these led to the following pages with a single word of text: 

<C1>/<Update #13> with #6F7262="orb", so [http://obduct.me/orb/scatter orb/scatter], "Karl" 

<C2>/<Update #15> with #746F70="top", so [http://obduct.me/top/reward top/reward], "moved" 

<C3>/<Update #16> with #6C6970="lip", so [http://obduct.me/lip/officially lip/officially], "away" 

== Sites to Watch for Clues ==

[http://obductiongame.com/ OBDUCTION website] (in the video)

[https://www.facebook.com/CyanGames Cyan's Facebook Page]

[http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/ Reddit]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts Obduction Kickstarter Updates]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/cyaninc/comments Cyan Comments on Kickstarter]

[https://twitter.com/cyanworlds Cyan on Twitter]

[https://twitter.com/ryanwarzecha/ Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) on Twitter]

[http://cyan.com/ Cyan website]

[https://www.pinterest.com/cyaninc/ Cyan on Pinterest]

[https://mobile.twitter.com/obduction Obduction on Twitter]

== All Cyan Posts ==

A reference section, these are all posts by Cyanists leading up to and throughout the Kickstarter campaign. This might give some clues on how they think and where their posts might appear. Also, some of the clues might still be relevant to later puzzles. Unless otherwise stated, all of the posts & statements quoted below are from the [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28 Looking Forward to that Kickstarter ;)] thread on the Cyan forums.

Sep 10: Eric A Anderson (edoublea) [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151380233143078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page under “Photos of Cyan Inc.” with the comment, "...I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, and I must admit however, such conjecture is futile..." Ainia speculates it has something to do with an outside project of Eric's, The Witness. edoublea replies, "Nope. Think '''FARTHER'''." Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=405#p405 posts], "However Montana has some nice trees, ever think of looking over there?" greydragon will later [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=664#p664 post] "Montana means nothing - The quote on the first one has nothing to do with this game... We just wanted you to read it all the way through and say... 'the ending has not yet been written'"

Sep 15: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151391065353078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page with the comment, "Unbounded in its ken..." Zardoz [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=495#p495 posts] "The quote is from a Robert Gambol poem (The Beauties of the Universe, 1732, partially reproduced below):"

Sep 16: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=528#p528 posts], "Unbounded in its ken, from prison free / Will clearly view what here we darkly see: / Those planetary worlds, and thousands more, / Now veil’d from human sight, it shall explore." and "Maybe there are more levels to this than you know." with the word "levels" fading in color. Zardoz speculates "I think the point of "levels" is the shades of grey - which is to say that eaa is telling us the poem itself is important" and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=533#p533 replies], "Perhaps. Or maybe you need to make an adjustment to your thinking."

Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=538#p538 posts an image] which, after various image processing things with the exposure and contrast, reveals hidden letters.

Samsbase wonders about the first image and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=546#p546 replies] "Or maybe.... just maybe... eaa didn't embed anything in the first one, because he didn't realize people wanted so desperately to FIND things, and has since remedied that with the follow-ups. But you can keep digging, if you really want to." all in tiny font except for the "keep digging." This turns out to be simply a reference to planting seeds.

Sep 17: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151393080463078&id=9225241363 posts] an image on Cyan's Facebook page with the comment, "...and each step will be made in the wink of an eye." which is from The Wizard of Oz. Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=548#p548 posts] the quote.

edoublea [http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/1mk5wk/cyan_dropping_new_image_hints/ posts] on Reddit: "A wild clue has appeared! http://imgur.com/7KujlVh Enjoy. ;}" and greydragon posts on his personal Facebook page, "Reddit is fun ;)" Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=590#p590 posts] about these and begins the speculation. Madhatt3r deciphers the wingdings in the image to read "walking shark" and Rehvaro [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=597#p597 posts] "Why a Stegosaurus ? Why a Graph ? Why "No!" ? Maybe it's a "rebus": Stego + No! + Graph = Steganography ?" Several people try different things with stenography sites, but get nowhere. Zib figures out that "walking shark" means mobilefish.com, tries the image there and gets [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=632#p632 an image of a seed] with the words, "Prepate to be scattered." edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=644#p644 posts], "Dang it. That's what I get for not spell-checking my ominous clues before cryptographically encoding them in abstact sneak-peek images. I promus to spel bettr next tyme."

Madhatt3r [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=673#p673 posts] an image of the two images together which appears to be a plant sprouting from a seed.

Sep 28: <@LemonLime> (Eric) posts in Cyan Chat: "x6yoZIW Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains." Ahlisendar [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=845#p845 posts the image] and Buzzle1 [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=846#p846 posts] an excerpt from The Road by Cormac McCarthy which includes the quote posted by LemonLime as well as "Maps and mazes."

Oct 2: [http://www.inlander.com/spokane/writing-the-next-age/Content?oid=2194852 Inlander article about Myst 20th Anniversary] mentions Cyan's plans to launch a Kickstarter soon and Rand offers the teaser, "A white picket fence and an old farmhouse on a strange and alien world, without explanation for how they arrived."

Oct 5: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=914#p914 posts] "Since everyone gave up... http://www.devfarm.it/steganography/" The players now try the images and various passwords in this site, but without luck.

Oct 6: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=924#p924 posts] that the site doesn't seem to be working, apologizes and gives the answer: "The password was "mazes", from that Cormac McCarthy quote. Rather than watch everyone fight with a broken PHP error, I'm just going to leave the decrypted payload image right here...http://imgur.com/PR0LeZP"

Oct 6: LemonLime posts in CyanChat: "/a/JJNoN I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along." Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=928#p928 posts] the image and an excerpt from "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard which includes the line quoted by LemonLime as well as the word, "imperfections" which was the key Zib used with mobilefish to find a new [http://i.imgur.com/zCDTvtZ.jpg image] which appeared to be a Magic Eye puzzle. The players were able to see letters in the image and finally work out "ODUCTiN." Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=947#p947 posts] that his brother remembered something Rand said at Mysterium 2009: "…there was a project called Abduction which was more of a single player game..."

Oct 10: Shahneer [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=989#p989 posts] about discovering an image with the word "Obduction" on the DRC site.
Oct 12: WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1023#p1023 posts] a partial image of what he captured from the DRC site.

Oct 13: Buzzle1 discovers [http://redditmetrics.com/r/Obduction] which links to a [http://www.reddit.com/r/Obduction/comments/1odh0k/you_guys_waste_no_time/ post on Reddit] by edoublea: "You guys waste no time. And for that, your reward: http://i.imgur.com/oRTaRx3.jpg"

Oct 14: Trekluver posts a link to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obduction Obduction wikipedia article] and WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1052#p1052 posts] the full image of what he captured from the DRC site. andys1376 discovers the [http://obductiongame.com/ Obduction website]

Oct 15: Chogon [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1068&f=5#p1068 posts] an announcement about an upcoming forum outage and update which includes the line, "And 3) I hope this doesn't interfere with the timing of the … what's that? Gotta go."

Oct 16: rivenwanderer discovers an [https://twitter.com/obduction Obduction Twitter account].

Obduction ARG

2013-11-10T23:22:17Z

Ccstat: Reworded and consolidated paragraphs throughout, clarified the obduct.me process

== Obduction Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Progress ==

In late August, Cyan Worlds, Inc. began releasing hints and clues to what would later be revealed to be their new game project, Obduction. Prior to the Kickstarter campaign, several images were teased in encrypted form. These images were mostly screenshots from the then-unreleased Kickstarter trailer and included letters from the name Obduction, hinting at the title. (See the "All Cyan Posts" section below for specifics). 
With the beginning of the Kickstarter campaign, Cyan released clues through the kickstarter material and surrounding promotional activity that have so far led to several websites. This segment of the ARG is ongoing. Broadly, clues in the kickstarter video led to a website called hiredark.com, which has several sub-directories with various clues. These clues have since led to the site obduct.me.

== Kickstarter Video ==

During the Kickstarter video for the game, three words are displayed.

* 3:20 - yellowbrick
* 3:23 - firelight
* 4:05 - germinate

When these words are typed into posts at the Cyan forums, the ("swear-word") filter changes the words to:

* yellowbrick: is.gd
* firelight: odu
* germinate: tol

This was found to be a short URL link: http://is.gd/odutol

The shortlink led to a YouTube video with the title ''4/3 π r3'', uploaded by user ''Chester C''.

The title of the video is the formula for finding the volume of a sphere. The video is three seconds long, cycling through images of different round or spherical objects. The audio of the video (a series of high-pitched beeping sounds) was found to contain a [http://www.texturu.org/share/images/cyan-qr.jpg QR Code] leading to the site http://hiredark.com.

== Hiredark ==
The site hiredark.com simulates the appearance of a Linux/Unix shell (terminal) running a count-down timer. The timer is scripted in (dynamic) PHP, which generates a Javascript script. The units of the timer appear to be milliseconds, and the timer itself appears to be counting down to January 6, 2014. In addition, the script is coded to display the message "You do not have sufficient permission to cancel this process." if the user attempts to "end" the counter from the simulated command line using the key combination CTRL+C.

=== Words ===
In their [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/648330 Kickstarter Update #12] Cyan gave a hint at the bottom of the update: '''"/words/<AMA>"'''. By appending the hiredark URL with "/words/", it was found that http://hiredark.com/words/ is a valid page, but no access granted.

Having a look again to the [http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ozzcx/rand_miller_here_cocreator_of_myst_riven_got_a/ reddit AMA page], it was suspicious that Rand Miller used the word "swell" really often in his welcome message. Adding "swell" to the URL again gave a valid page http://hiredark.com/words/swell/ which contains the text of an apparently "nonsense" poem. Searching for the text of the strange poem using a search engine revealed that the text was derived from the poetry of Walt Whitman, specifically the poem [http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/on_the_beach_at_night_alone.html "On the Beach at Night Alone"]. As one can see, every fourth word from this poem is used to derive the Cyan versions of it.

The following day, Rand fave a hint in an [http://www.twitch.tv/ingamechat/b/476050041 In-Game Chat interview] ("'''/words/<update#6>'''"), and a new page was found, http://hiredark.com/words/surprise/. These words are also every fourth word of the Whitman poem, but with an offset of -1 compared to the /swell words (that is, each word in /surprise is the word in Whitman just before the word used in /swell.)

Following the pattern of looking for prominent or frequently-used words in the updates, two additional pages were discovered, at [http://www.hiredark.com/words/add-on/ words/add-on] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/640239 update #7])and [http://www.hiredark.com/words/name/ words/name] (from [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/646673 update #11]). These pages contained the rest of the words to the Whitman poem, with an offset of -3 and -2 respectively from the first page discovered.

After reconstructing the poem through these pages, it was discovered that one word was different from the original - "shades" instead of "worlds" in verse 8.

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Whitman's "On the Beach at Night Alone"
|-
|
:On the ''beach'' '''at''' night alone, 
:''As'' '''the''' old mother ''sways'' '''her''' to and ''fro'' '''singing''' her husky ''song,'' 
:'''As''' I watch ''the'' '''bright''' stars shining, ''I'' '''think''' a thought ''of'' '''the''' clef of ''the'' '''universes''' and of ''the'' '''future.''' 
: 
:A vast ''similitude'' '''interlocks''' all, 
:All ''spheres,'' '''grown,''' ungrown, small, ''large,'' '''suns,''' moons, planets, 
:''All'' '''distances''' of place ''however'' '''wide,''' 
:All distances ''of'' '''time,''' all inanimate ''forms,'' 
:'''All''' souls, all ''living'' '''bodies''' though they ''be'' '''ever''' so different, ''or'' '''in''' different worlds, 
:''All'' '''gaseous,''' watery, vegetable, ''mineral'' '''processes,''' the fishes, ''the'' '''brutes,''' 
:All nations, ''colors,'' '''barbarisms,''' civilizations, languages, 
:''All'' '''identities''' that have ''existed'' '''or''' may exist ''on'' '''this''' globe, or ''any'' '''globe,''' 
:All lives ''and'' '''deaths,''' all of ''the'' '''past,''' present, future, 
:''This'' '''vast''' similitude spans ''them,'' '''and''' always has ''spann'd,'' 
:'''And''' shall forever ''span'' '''them''' and compactly ''hold'' '''and''' enclose them. 
|}

(The bold and italic faces only emphasize the connections between the versions, and are not original to the Whitman poem.)

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! hiredark.com/words/add-on/
! hiredark.com/words/name/
! hiredark.com/words/surprise
! hiredark.com/words/swell
|-
|
On night 
old to her 
I stars a clef and 
 
A all, 
ungrown, moons, 
of 
All all 
souls, though so different 
watery, the 
All civilizations, 
that may globe, 
All all present, 
similitude always 
shall and enclose 
|
<center>
the alone, 
mother and husky 
watch shining, thought of of 
 
vast 
All small, planets, 
place 
distances inanimate 
all they different, '''shades,''' 
vegetable, fishes, 
nations, languages, 
have exist, or 
lives of future, 
spans has 
forever compactly them. 
</center>
|
beach 
As sways fro, song, 
the I of the the 
 
similitude 
spheres, large, 
All however 
of forms, 
living be or 
All mineral the 
colors, 
All existed, on any 
and the 
This them, spann'd, 
span hold 
|
<center>
at 
the her singing 
As bright think the universes, future. 
 
interlocks 
grown, suns, 
distances wide, 
time, 
All bodies, ever in 
gaseous, processes, brutes, 
barbarisms, 
identities or this globe, 
deaths, past, 
vast and 
And them and 
</center>
|-
| <center>each 4th word, offset -3</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -2</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -1</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset 0</center>
|}

=== Worlds ===
Guessing that "words" could be a misspelling, simply trying to browse to http://hiredark.com/worlds/ revealed that this opens a page as well; a page with a pure black background and nothing else in it.

Either once this link was posted in the Cyan forums (assuming Cyan employees watching the progress in the thread) - or by simply refreshing the content of the browser (assuming there is some automated mechanism updating content) - had the effect that the page now contained a small circle. This circle was an image named "worlds.png" (circle color = #667766). It had already been observed that the dot-color of Cyan's logo had slightly changed from a bright cyan (#00d8ff) to a color with hex value #667766.

The content of the page worlds changed again almost immediately; this time the color of the circle changed was #637777, and the png image was replaced by an svg version. This change coincided with an identical change in the color of the dot in the Cyan logo. The color of both dots then changed again, this time to #55557A.

After the four portions of the Walt Whitman poem were discovered, a discrepancy was noted in the /words/name/ portion of the poetry. Where the word "worlds" should have appeared, there was instead the word "shades" (see above table). Upon attempting the url http://www.hiredark.com/worlds/shades/ , yet another page was discovered which had not one but four circles, each in a different color corresponding to one of the previous color values of the Cyan dot.

In the next few days the color changed multiple times, and with each change a new circle was added for a total of nine circles arranged vertically. The colors of these have hex values of #667766, #637777, #55557A, #333371, #445844, #729999, #888862, #114F11, and #222264. The newest circle always matched the colors that have appeared on the /worlds/ page and also the color of the Cyan logo dot.

The hex value for each color contains four identical digits and two that don't match. The non-matching digits are always a valid ASCII identifier for a letter. In order of appearance, these are 77=w, 63=c, 7A=z, 71=q, 58=X, 72=r, 62=b, 4F=O, 64=d. The four matching digits from each color are distinct values 1-9, suggesting an order in which they should be placed. When arranged in ascending numerical sequence by these digits, rather than by chronological appearance, the letters form the string "OdqXzwcbr". If entered as as part of the url it gives http://hiredark.com/OdqXzwcbr which at first was a blank page but now redirects to http://obduct.me

== Obduct.me ==
http://obduct.me consisted of the Cyan logo, in SVG form, on a black background. After the nine color changes (see above) the Cyan dot reverted to its original color and the C portion of the logo began to undergo similar color changes. The hex value of the first color was 6F7262, which is ASCII for "orb". Noticing that http://obduct.me/orb is an existing (only Forbidden) page, and assuming a similar pattern as before with using prominent words from Kickstarter updates, led to http://obduct.me/orb/scatter, which displays the single word "Karl". The page corresponds to a Cyan clue for <C1>/<Update #13>. 

The color of the C changed several more times. Following the above pattern, these led to the following pages with a single word of text: 

<C1>/<Update #13> gave #6F7262="orb", so [http://obduct.me/orb/scatter orb/scatter], "Karl" 

<C2>/<Update #15> gave #746F70="top", so [http://obduct.me/top/reward top/reward], "moved" 

<C3>/<Update #16> gave #6C6970="lip", so [http://obduct.me/lip/officially orb/officially], "away" 

== Sites to Watch for Clues ==

[http://obductiongame.com/ OBDUCTION website] (in the video)

[https://www.facebook.com/CyanGames Cyan's Facebook Page]

[http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/ Reddit]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts Obduction Kickstarter Updates]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/cyaninc/comments Cyan Comments on Kickstarter]

[https://twitter.com/cyanworlds Cyan on Twitter]

[https://twitter.com/ryanwarzecha/ Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) on Twitter]

[http://cyan.com/ Cyan website]

[https://www.pinterest.com/cyaninc/ Cyan on Pinterest]

[https://mobile.twitter.com/obduction Obduction on Twitter]

== All Cyan Posts ==

A reference section, these are all posts by Cyanists leading up to and throughout the Kickstarter campaign. This might give some clues on how they think and where their posts might appear. Also, some of the clues might still be relevant to later puzzles. Unless otherwise stated, all of the posts & statements quoted below are from the [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28 Looking Forward to that Kickstarter ;)] thread on the Cyan forums.

Sep 10: Eric A Anderson (edoublea) [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151380233143078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page under “Photos of Cyan Inc.” with the comment, "...I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, and I must admit however, such conjecture is futile..." Ainia speculates it has something to do with an outside project of Eric's, The Witness. edoublea replies, "Nope. Think '''FARTHER'''." Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=405#p405 posts], "However Montana has some nice trees, ever think of looking over there?" greydragon will later [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=664#p664 post] "Montana means nothing - The quote on the first one has nothing to do with this game... We just wanted you to read it all the way through and say... 'the ending has not yet been written'"

Sep 15: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151391065353078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page with the comment, "Unbounded in its ken..." Zardoz [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=495#p495 posts] "The quote is from a Robert Gambol poem (The Beauties of the Universe, 1732, partially reproduced below):"

Sep 16: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=528#p528 posts], "Unbounded in its ken, from prison free / Will clearly view what here we darkly see: / Those planetary worlds, and thousands more, / Now veil’d from human sight, it shall explore." and "Maybe there are more levels to this than you know." with the word "levels" fading in color. Zardoz speculates "I think the point of "levels" is the shades of grey - which is to say that eaa is telling us the poem itself is important" and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=533#p533 replies], "Perhaps. Or maybe you need to make an adjustment to your thinking."

Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=538#p538 posts an image] which, after various image processing things with the exposure and contrast, reveals hidden letters.

Samsbase wonders about the first image and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=546#p546 replies] "Or maybe.... just maybe... eaa didn't embed anything in the first one, because he didn't realize people wanted so desperately to FIND things, and has since remedied that with the follow-ups. But you can keep digging, if you really want to." all in tiny font except for the "keep digging." This turns out to be simply a reference to planting seeds.

Sep 17: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151393080463078&id=9225241363 posts] an image on Cyan's Facebook page with the comment, "...and each step will be made in the wink of an eye." which is from The Wizard of Oz. Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=548#p548 posts] the quote.

edoublea [http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/1mk5wk/cyan_dropping_new_image_hints/ posts] on Reddit: "A wild clue has appeared! http://imgur.com/7KujlVh Enjoy. ;}" and greydragon posts on his personal Facebook page, "Reddit is fun ;)" Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=590#p590 posts] about these and begins the speculation. Madhatt3r deciphers the wingdings in the image to read "walking shark" and Rehvaro [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=597#p597 posts] "Why a Stegosaurus ? Why a Graph ? Why "No!" ? Maybe it's a "rebus": Stego + No! + Graph = Steganography ?" Several people try different things with stenography sites, but get nowhere. Zib figures out that "walking shark" means mobilefish.com, tries the image there and gets [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=632#p632 an image of a seed] with the words, "Prepate to be scattered." edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=644#p644 posts], "Dang it. That's what I get for not spell-checking my ominous clues before cryptographically encoding them in abstact sneak-peek images. I promus to spel bettr next tyme."

Madhatt3r [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=673#p673 posts] an image of the two images together which appears to be a plant sprouting from a seed.

Sep 28: <@LemonLime> (Eric) posts in Cyan Chat: "x6yoZIW Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains." Ahlisendar [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=845#p845 posts the image] and Buzzle1 [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=846#p846 posts] an excerpt from The Road by Cormac McCarthy which includes the quote posted by LemonLime as well as "Maps and mazes."

Oct 2: [http://www.inlander.com/spokane/writing-the-next-age/Content?oid=2194852 Inlander article about Myst 20th Anniversary] mentions Cyan's plans to launch a Kickstarter soon and Rand offers the teaser, "A white picket fence and an old farmhouse on a strange and alien world, without explanation for how they arrived."

Oct 5: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=914#p914 posts] "Since everyone gave up... http://www.devfarm.it/steganography/" The players now try the images and various passwords in this site, but without luck.

Oct 6: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=924#p924 posts] that the site doesn't seem to be working, apologizes and gives the answer: "The password was "mazes", from that Cormac McCarthy quote. Rather than watch everyone fight with a broken PHP error, I'm just going to leave the decrypted payload image right here...http://imgur.com/PR0LeZP"

Oct 6: LemonLime posts in CyanChat: "/a/JJNoN I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along." Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=928#p928 posts] the image and an excerpt from "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard which includes the line quoted by LemonLime as well as the word, "imperfections" which was the key Zib used with mobilefish to find a new [http://i.imgur.com/zCDTvtZ.jpg image] which appeared to be a Magic Eye puzzle. The players were able to see letters in the image and finally work out "ODUCTiN." Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=947#p947 posts] that his brother remembered something Rand said at Mysterium 2009: "…there was a project called Abduction which was more of a single player game..."

Oct 10: Shahneer [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=989#p989 posts] about discovering an image with the word "Obduction" on the DRC site.
Oct 12: WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1023#p1023 posts] a partial image of what he captured from the DRC site.

Oct 13: Buzzle1 discovers [http://redditmetrics.com/r/Obduction] which links to a [http://www.reddit.com/r/Obduction/comments/1odh0k/you_guys_waste_no_time/ post on Reddit] by edoublea: "You guys waste no time. And for that, your reward: http://i.imgur.com/oRTaRx3.jpg"

Oct 14: Trekluver posts a link to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obduction Obduction wikipedia article] and WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1052#p1052 posts] the full image of what he captured from the DRC site. andys1376 discovers the [http://obductiongame.com/ Obduction website]

Oct 15: Chogon [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1068&f=5#p1068 posts] an announcement about an upcoming forum outage and update which includes the line, "And 3) I hope this doesn't interfere with the timing of the … what's that? Gotta go."

Oct 16: rivenwanderer discovers an [https://twitter.com/obduction Obduction Twitter account].

Obduction ARG

2013-11-10T05:02:55Z

Ccstat: Added Obduct.me section

== Obduction Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Progress ==

In late August, Cyan Worlds, Inc. began releasing hints and clues to what would later be revealed to be their new game project, Obduction. Prior to the Kickstarter campaign, several images were teased in encrypted form. These images were mostly screenshots from the then-unreleased Kickstarter trailer and included letters from the name Obduction, hinting at the title. (See the "All Cyan Posts" section below for specifics). 
With the beginning of the Kickstarter campaign, Cyan released clues through the kickstarter material and surrounding promotional activity that have so far led to several websites. This segment of the ARG is ongoing. Broadly, clues in the kickstarter video led to a website called hiredark.com, which has several sub-directories with various clues. These clues have since led to the site obduct.me.

== The Three Words ==

During the Kickstarter video for the game, three words are displayed.

* 3:20 - yellowbrick
* 3:23 - firelight
* 4:05 - germinate

When these words were discovered, and subsequently entered at the Cyan forums, the ("swear-word") filter changed the words to:

* yellowbrick: is.gd
* firelight: odu
* germinate: tol

This was found to be a short URL link: http://is.gd/odutol

The shortlink led to a YouTube video with the title ''4/3 π r3'', uploaded by user ''Chester C''.

== YouTube Video ==

The title of the video is the formula for finding the volume of a sphere.

The video is three seconds long, cycling through images of different round or spherical objects.

The audio of the video (a series of high-pitched beeping sounds) was found to contain a [http://www.texturu.org/share/images/cyan-qr.jpg QR Code] leading to the site http://hiredark.com.

== Hiredark ==
The site hiredark.com simulates the appearance of a Linux/Unix shell (terminal) running a count-down timer. The timer is scripted in (dynamic) PHP, which generates a Javascript script. The units of the timer appear to be milliseconds, and the timer itself appears to be counting down to January 6, 2014. In addition, the script is coded to display the message "You do not have sufficient permission to cancel this process." if the user attempts to "end" the counter from the simulated command line using the key combination CTRL+C.

== A hint from Cyan ==
In their [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/648330 Kickstarter Update #12] Cyan gave a hint at the bottom of the update: '''"/words/<AMA>"'''.

By appending the hiredark URL with "/words/", it was found that http://hiredark.com/words/ is a valid page, but no access granted.

Having a look again to the [http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ozzcx/rand_miller_here_cocreator_of_myst_riven_got_a/ reddit AMA page], it was suspicious that Rand Miller used the word "swell" really often in his welcome message.

Adding "swell" to the URL again gave a valid page which contains sort of a poem: http://hiredark.com/words/swell/ (See section "The Poem", below, for full text and source.)

== The Poem ==
When it was discovered on November 1, 2013, the page http://hiredark.com/words/swell/ contained the text of an apparently "nonsense" poem. Searching for the text of the strange poem using a search engine revealed that the text was derived from the poetry of Walt Whitman, specifically the poem [http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/on_the_beach_at_night_alone.html "On the Beach at Night Alone"]. As one can see, every fourth word from this poem is used to derive the Cyan versions of it.

On November 2, after a hint from Rand in an [http://www.twitch.tv/ingamechat/b/476050041 In-Game Chat interview] ("'''/words/<update#6>'''"), a new page was found, http://hiredark.com/words/surprise/. These words are also every fourth word of the Whitman poem, but with an offset of -1 compared to the /swell words (that is, each word in /surprise is the word in Whitman just before the word used in /swell.)

Later on November 2, two additional pages were discovered, at http://www.hiredark.com/words/add-on/ and http://www.hiredark.com/words/name/ . These pages contained the rest of the words to the Whitman poem, with an offset of -3 and -2 respectively from the first page discovered.

After reconstructing the poem through these pages, it was discovered that one word was different from the original - "shades" instead of "worlds" in verse 8.

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Whitman's "On the Beach at Night Alone"
|-
|
:On the ''beach'' '''at''' night alone, 
:''As'' '''the''' old mother ''sways'' '''her''' to and ''fro'' '''singing''' her husky ''song,'' 
:'''As''' I watch ''the'' '''bright''' stars shining, ''I'' '''think''' a thought ''of'' '''the''' clef of ''the'' '''universes''' and of ''the'' '''future.''' 
: 
:A vast ''similitude'' '''interlocks''' all, 
:All ''spheres,'' '''grown,''' ungrown, small, ''large,'' '''suns,''' moons, planets, 
:''All'' '''distances''' of place ''however'' '''wide,''' 
:All distances ''of'' '''time,''' all inanimate ''forms,'' 
:'''All''' souls, all ''living'' '''bodies''' though they ''be'' '''ever''' so different, ''or'' '''in''' different worlds, 
:''All'' '''gaseous,''' watery, vegetable, ''mineral'' '''processes,''' the fishes, ''the'' '''brutes,''' 
:All nations, ''colors,'' '''barbarisms,''' civilizations, languages, 
:''All'' '''identities''' that have ''existed'' '''or''' may exist ''on'' '''this''' globe, or ''any'' '''globe,''' 
:All lives ''and'' '''deaths,''' all of ''the'' '''past,''' present, future, 
:''This'' '''vast''' similitude spans ''them,'' '''and''' always has ''spann'd,'' 
:'''And''' shall forever ''span'' '''them''' and compactly ''hold'' '''and''' enclose them. 
|}

(The bold and italic faces only emphasize the connections between the versions, and are not original to the Whitman poem.)

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! hiredark.com/words/add-on/
! hiredark.com/words/name/
! hiredark.com/words/surprise
! hiredark.com/words/swell
|-
|
On night 
old to her 
I stars a clef and 
 
A all, 
ungrown, moons, 
of 
All all 
souls, though so different 
watery, the 
All civilizations, 
that may globe, 
All all present, 
similitude always 
shall and enclose 
|
<center>
the alone, 
mother and husky 
watch shining, thought of of 
 
vast 
All small, planets, 
place 
distances inanimate 
all they different, '''shades,''' 
vegetable, fishes, 
nations, languages, 
have exist, or 
lives of future, 
spans has 
forever compactly them. 
</center>
|
beach 
As sways fro, song, 
the I of the the 
 
similitude 
spheres, large, 
All however 
of forms, 
living be or 
All mineral the 
colors, 
All existed, on any 
and the 
This them, spann'd, 
span hold 
|
<center>
at 
the her singing 
As bright think the universes, future. 
 
interlocks 
grown, suns, 
distances wide, 
time, 
All bodies, ever in 
gaseous, processes, brutes, 
barbarisms, 
identities or this globe, 
deaths, past, 
vast and 
And them and 
</center>
|-
| <center>each 4th word, offset -3</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -2</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -1</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset 0</center>
|}

== Worlds ==
Guessing that "words" could be a misspelling, simply trying to browse to http://hiredark.com/worlds/ revealed that this opens a page as well; a page with a pure black background and nothing else in it.

Either once this link was posted in the Cyan forums (assuming Cyan employees watching the progress in the thread) - or by simply refreshing the content of the browser (assuming there is some automated mechanism updating content) - had the effect that the page now contained a small circle. This circle was an image named "worlds.png" (circle color = #667766).

Already earlier is was observed that the dot-color of Cyan's logo slightly changed from a bright cyan (#00d8ff) to a color with hex value #667766.

Once it was posted in the forums that now the content of http://hiredark.com/worlds/ had changed, it was observed that the content already changed again; this time the color of the circle changed to #637777, and the png image was replaced by an svg version.

It was observed later that the color changed again, this time to #55557A. The dot-color in the Cyan logo changed accordingly each time.

After the four portions of the Walt Whitman poem were discovered, a discrepancy was noted in the /words/name/ portion of the poetry. Where the word "worlds" should have appeared, there was instead the word "shades" (see above table). Upon attempting the url http://www.hiredark.com/worlds/shades/ , yet another page was discovered which had not one but four circles, each in a different color. In the next few days more were been added, for a total of nine circles arranged vertically. The colors of these have hex values of 667766, 637777, 55557A, 333371, 445844, 729999, 888862, 114F11, and 222264. The newest circle always matched the colors that have appeared on the /worlds/ page and also the color of the Cyan logo dot.

The hex value for each color contains four identical digits and two that don't match. The non-matching digits are always a valid ASCII identifier for a letter. In order of appearance, these are 77=w, 63=c, 7A=z, 71=q, 58=X, 72=r, 62=b, 4F=O, 64=d. The four matching digits from each color are distinct values 1-9. When arranged in ascending numerical sequence by these digits, rather than by chronological appearance, the letters form the string "OdqXzwcbr". If entered as a directory (in place of worlds) it gives hiredark.com/OdqXzwcbr which at first was a blank page and now redirects to obduct.me

== Obduct.me ==
After the nine color changes (see above) the Cyan dot reverted to its original color and the C portion of the logo began to undergo color changes.
The hex value of the first color was 6F7262, which is ASCII for "orb". Entering prominent words from kickstarter updates led to obduct.me/orb/scatter, which displays the single word "Karl". The page corresponds to a Cyan clue for <C1>/<Update #13>. 

The color of the C subsequently changed again to 746f70, ASCII for "top". The Cyan clue <C2>/<Update #15> leads to obduct.me/top/reward, with the word "moved". Guessing at three letter words in combination with prominent words from updates #16 and #18 have led to two more obduct.me pages displaying a single word each. These are likely where the next color change values will direct, but it has been suggested that these pages not be entered here in the wiki until the C color actually directs to them.

== Sites to Watch for Clues ==

[http://obductiongame.com/ OBDUCTION website] (in the video)

[https://www.facebook.com/CyanGames Cyan's Facebook Page]

[http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/ Reddit]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts Obduction Kickstarter Updates]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/cyaninc/comments Cyan Comments on Kickstarter]

[https://twitter.com/cyanworlds Cyan on Twitter]

[https://twitter.com/ryanwarzecha/ Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) on Twitter]

[http://cyan.com/ Cyan website]

[https://www.pinterest.com/cyaninc/ Cyan on Pinterest]

[https://mobile.twitter.com/obduction Obduction on Twitter]

== All Cyan Posts ==

A reference section, these are all posts by Cyanists leading up to and throughout the Kickstarter campaign. This might give some clues on how they think and where their posts might appear. Also, some of the clues might still be relevant to later puzzles. Unless otherwise stated, all of the posts & statements quoted below are from the [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28 Looking Forward to that Kickstarter ;)] thread on the Cyan forums.

Sep 10: Eric A Anderson (edoublea) [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151380233143078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page under “Photos of Cyan Inc.” with the comment, "...I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, and I must admit however, such conjecture is futile..." Ainia speculates it has something to do with an outside project of Eric's, The Witness. edoublea replies, "Nope. Think '''FARTHER'''." Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=405#p405 posts], "However Montana has some nice trees, ever think of looking over there?" greydragon will later [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=664#p664 post] "Montana means nothing - The quote on the first one has nothing to do with this game... We just wanted you to read it all the way through and say... 'the ending has not yet been written'"

Sep 15: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151391065353078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page with the comment, "Unbounded in its ken..." Zardoz [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=495#p495 posts] "The quote is from a Robert Gambol poem (The Beauties of the Universe, 1732, partially reproduced below):"

Sep 16: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=528#p528 posts], "Unbounded in its ken, from prison free / Will clearly view what here we darkly see: / Those planetary worlds, and thousands more, / Now veil’d from human sight, it shall explore." and "Maybe there are more levels to this than you know." with the word "levels" fading in color. Zardoz speculates "I think the point of "levels" is the shades of grey - which is to say that eaa is telling us the poem itself is important" and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=533#p533 replies], "Perhaps. Or maybe you need to make an adjustment to your thinking."

Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=538#p538 posts an image] which, after various image processing things with the exposure and contrast, reveals hidden letters.

Samsbase wonders about the first image and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=546#p546 replies] "Or maybe.... just maybe... eaa didn't embed anything in the first one, because he didn't realize people wanted so desperately to FIND things, and has since remedied that with the follow-ups. But you can keep digging, if you really want to." all in tiny font except for the "keep digging." This turns out to be simply a reference to planting seeds.

Sep 17: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151393080463078&id=9225241363 posts] an image on Cyan's Facebook page with the comment, "...and each step will be made in the wink of an eye." which is from The Wizard of Oz. Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=548#p548 posts] the quote.

edoublea [http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/1mk5wk/cyan_dropping_new_image_hints/ posts] on Reddit: "A wild clue has appeared! http://imgur.com/7KujlVh Enjoy. ;}" and greydragon posts on his personal Facebook page, "Reddit is fun ;)" Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=590#p590 posts] about these and begins the speculation. Madhatt3r deciphers the wingdings in the image to read "walking shark" and Rehvaro [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=597#p597 posts] "Why a Stegosaurus ? Why a Graph ? Why "No!" ? Maybe it's a "rebus": Stego + No! + Graph = Steganography ?" Several people try different things with stenography sites, but get nowhere. Zib figures out that "walking shark" means mobilefish.com, tries the image there and gets [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=632#p632 an image of a seed] with the words, "Prepate to be scattered." edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=644#p644 posts], "Dang it. That's what I get for not spell-checking my ominous clues before cryptographically encoding them in abstact sneak-peek images. I promus to spel bettr next tyme."

Madhatt3r [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=673#p673 posts] an image of the two images together which appears to be a plant sprouting from a seed.

Sep 28: <@LemonLime> (Eric) posts in Cyan Chat: "x6yoZIW Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains." Ahlisendar [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=845#p845 posts the image] and Buzzle1 [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=846#p846 posts] an excerpt from The Road by Cormac McCarthy which includes the quote posted by LemonLime as well as "Maps and mazes."

Oct 2: [http://www.inlander.com/spokane/writing-the-next-age/Content?oid=2194852 Inlander article about Myst 20th Anniversary] mentions Cyan's plans to launch a Kickstarter soon and Rand offers the teaser, "A white picket fence and an old farmhouse on a strange and alien world, without explanation for how they arrived."

Oct 5: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=914#p914 posts] "Since everyone gave up... http://www.devfarm.it/steganography/" The players now try the images and various passwords in this site, but without luck.

Oct 6: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=924#p924 posts] that the site doesn't seem to be working, apologizes and gives the answer: "The password was "mazes", from that Cormac McCarthy quote. Rather than watch everyone fight with a broken PHP error, I'm just going to leave the decrypted payload image right here...http://imgur.com/PR0LeZP"

Oct 6: LemonLime posts in CyanChat: "/a/JJNoN I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along." Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=928#p928 posts] the image and an excerpt from "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard which includes the line quoted by LemonLime as well as the word, "imperfections" which was the key Zib used with mobilefish to find a new [http://i.imgur.com/zCDTvtZ.jpg image] which appeared to be a Magic Eye puzzle. The players were able to see letters in the image and finally work out "ODUCTiN." Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=947#p947 posts] that his brother remembered something Rand said at Mysterium 2009: "…there was a project called Abduction which was more of a single player game..."

Oct 10: Shahneer [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=989#p989 posts] about discovering an image with the word "Obduction" on the DRC site.
Oct 12: WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1023#p1023 posts] a partial image of what he captured from the DRC site.

Oct 13: Buzzle1 discovers [http://redditmetrics.com/r/Obduction] which links to a [http://www.reddit.com/r/Obduction/comments/1odh0k/you_guys_waste_no_time/ post on Reddit] by edoublea: "You guys waste no time. And for that, your reward: http://i.imgur.com/oRTaRx3.jpg"

Oct 14: Trekluver posts a link to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obduction Obduction wikipedia article] and WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1052#p1052 posts] the full image of what he captured from the DRC site. andys1376 discovers the [http://obductiongame.com/ Obduction website]

Oct 15: Chogon [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1068&f=5#p1068 posts] an announcement about an upcoming forum outage and update which includes the line, "And 3) I hope this doesn't interfere with the timing of the … what's that? Gotta go."

Oct 16: rivenwanderer discovers an [https://twitter.com/obduction Obduction Twitter account].

Obduction ARG

2013-11-10T04:44:48Z

Ccstat: /* Worlds */ Added all the colors from worlds/shades and the ASCII interpretation

== Obduction Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Progress ==

In late August, Cyan Worlds, Inc. began releasing hints and clues to what would later be revealed to be their new game project, Obduction. Prior to the Kickstarter campaign, several images were teased in encrypted form. These images were mostly screenshots from the then-unreleased Kickstarter trailer and included letters from the name Obduction, hinting at the title. (See the "All Cyan Posts" section below for specifics). 
With the beginning of the Kickstarter campaign, Cyan released clues through the kickstarter material and surrounding promotional activity that have so far led to several websites. This segment of the ARG is ongoing. Broadly, clues in the kickstarter video led to a website called hiredark.com, which has several sub-directories with various clues. These clues have since led to the site obduct.me.

== The Three Words ==

During the Kickstarter video for the game, three words are displayed.

* 3:20 - yellowbrick
* 3:23 - firelight
* 4:05 - germinate

When these words were discovered, and subsequently entered at the Cyan forums, the ("swear-word") filter changed the words to:

* yellowbrick: is.gd
* firelight: odu
* germinate: tol

This was found to be a short URL link: http://is.gd/odutol

The shortlink led to a YouTube video with the title ''4/3 π r3'', uploaded by user ''Chester C''.

== YouTube Video ==

The title of the video is the formula for finding the volume of a sphere.

The video is three seconds long, cycling through images of different round or spherical objects.

The audio of the video (a series of high-pitched beeping sounds) was found to contain a [http://www.texturu.org/share/images/cyan-qr.jpg QR Code] leading to the site http://hiredark.com.

== Hiredark ==
The site hiredark.com simulates the appearance of a Linux/Unix shell (terminal) running a count-down timer. The timer is scripted in (dynamic) PHP, which generates a Javascript script. The units of the timer appear to be milliseconds, and the timer itself appears to be counting down to January 6, 2014. In addition, the script is coded to display the message "You do not have sufficient permission to cancel this process." if the user attempts to "end" the counter from the simulated command line using the key combination CTRL+C.

== A hint from Cyan ==
In their [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/648330 Kickstarter Update #12] Cyan gave a hint at the bottom of the update: '''"/words/<AMA>"'''.

By appending the hiredark URL with "/words/", it was found that http://hiredark.com/words/ is a valid page, but no access granted.

Having a look again to the [http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ozzcx/rand_miller_here_cocreator_of_myst_riven_got_a/ reddit AMA page], it was suspicious that Rand Miller used the word "swell" really often in his welcome message.

Adding "swell" to the URL again gave a valid page which contains sort of a poem: http://hiredark.com/words/swell/ (See section "The Poem", below, for full text and source.)

== The Poem ==
When it was discovered on November 1, 2013, the page http://hiredark.com/words/swell/ contained the text of an apparently "nonsense" poem. Searching for the text of the strange poem using a search engine revealed that the text was derived from the poetry of Walt Whitman, specifically the poem [http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/on_the_beach_at_night_alone.html "On the Beach at Night Alone"]. As one can see, every fourth word from this poem is used to derive the Cyan versions of it.

On November 2, after a hint from Rand in an [http://www.twitch.tv/ingamechat/b/476050041 In-Game Chat interview] ("'''/words/<update#6>'''"), a new page was found, http://hiredark.com/words/surprise/. These words are also every fourth word of the Whitman poem, but with an offset of -1 compared to the /swell words (that is, each word in /surprise is the word in Whitman just before the word used in /swell.)

Later on November 2, two additional pages were discovered, at http://www.hiredark.com/words/add-on/ and http://www.hiredark.com/words/name/ . These pages contained the rest of the words to the Whitman poem, with an offset of -3 and -2 respectively from the first page discovered.

After reconstructing the poem through these pages, it was discovered that one word was different from the original - "shades" instead of "worlds" in verse 8.

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Whitman's "On the Beach at Night Alone"
|-
|
:On the ''beach'' '''at''' night alone, 
:''As'' '''the''' old mother ''sways'' '''her''' to and ''fro'' '''singing''' her husky ''song,'' 
:'''As''' I watch ''the'' '''bright''' stars shining, ''I'' '''think''' a thought ''of'' '''the''' clef of ''the'' '''universes''' and of ''the'' '''future.''' 
: 
:A vast ''similitude'' '''interlocks''' all, 
:All ''spheres,'' '''grown,''' ungrown, small, ''large,'' '''suns,''' moons, planets, 
:''All'' '''distances''' of place ''however'' '''wide,''' 
:All distances ''of'' '''time,''' all inanimate ''forms,'' 
:'''All''' souls, all ''living'' '''bodies''' though they ''be'' '''ever''' so different, ''or'' '''in''' different worlds, 
:''All'' '''gaseous,''' watery, vegetable, ''mineral'' '''processes,''' the fishes, ''the'' '''brutes,''' 
:All nations, ''colors,'' '''barbarisms,''' civilizations, languages, 
:''All'' '''identities''' that have ''existed'' '''or''' may exist ''on'' '''this''' globe, or ''any'' '''globe,''' 
:All lives ''and'' '''deaths,''' all of ''the'' '''past,''' present, future, 
:''This'' '''vast''' similitude spans ''them,'' '''and''' always has ''spann'd,'' 
:'''And''' shall forever ''span'' '''them''' and compactly ''hold'' '''and''' enclose them. 
|}

(The bold and italic faces only emphasize the connections between the versions, and are not original to the Whitman poem.)

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! hiredark.com/words/add-on/
! hiredark.com/words/name/
! hiredark.com/words/surprise
! hiredark.com/words/swell
|-
|
On night 
old to her 
I stars a clef and 
 
A all, 
ungrown, moons, 
of 
All all 
souls, though so different 
watery, the 
All civilizations, 
that may globe, 
All all present, 
similitude always 
shall and enclose 
|
<center>
the alone, 
mother and husky 
watch shining, thought of of 
 
vast 
All small, planets, 
place 
distances inanimate 
all they different, '''shades,''' 
vegetable, fishes, 
nations, languages, 
have exist, or 
lives of future, 
spans has 
forever compactly them. 
</center>
|
beach 
As sways fro, song, 
the I of the the 
 
similitude 
spheres, large, 
All however 
of forms, 
living be or 
All mineral the 
colors, 
All existed, on any 
and the 
This them, spann'd, 
span hold 
|
<center>
at 
the her singing 
As bright think the universes, future. 
 
interlocks 
grown, suns, 
distances wide, 
time, 
All bodies, ever in 
gaseous, processes, brutes, 
barbarisms, 
identities or this globe, 
deaths, past, 
vast and 
And them and 
</center>
|-
| <center>each 4th word, offset -3</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -2</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -1</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset 0</center>
|}

== Worlds ==
Guessing that "words" could be a misspelling, simply trying to browse to http://hiredark.com/worlds/ revealed that this opens a page as well; a page with a pure black background and nothing else in it.

Either once this link was posted in the Cyan forums (assuming Cyan employees watching the progress in the thread) - or by simply refreshing the content of the browser (assuming there is some automated mechanism updating content) - had the effect that the page now contained a small circle. This circle was an image named "worlds.png" (circle color = #667766).

Already earlier is was observed that the dot-color of Cyan's logo slightly changed from a bright cyan (#00d8ff) to a color with hex value #667766.

Once it was posted in the forums that now the content of http://hiredark.com/worlds/ had changed, it was observed that the content already changed again; this time the color of the circle changed to #637777, and the png image was replaced by an svg version.

It was observed later that the color changed again, this time to #55557A. The dot-color in the Cyan logo changed accordingly each time.

After the four portions of the Walt Whitman poem were discovered, a discrepancy was noted in the /words/name/ portion of the poetry. Where the word "worlds" should have appeared, there was instead the word "shades" (see above table). Upon attempting the url http://www.hiredark.com/worlds/shades/ , yet another page was discovered which had not one but four circles, each in a different color. In the next few days more were been added, for a total of nine circles arranged vertically. The colors of these have hex values of 667766, 637777, 55557A, 333371, 445844, 729999, 888862, 114F11, and 222264. The newest circle always matched the colors that have appeared on the /worlds/ page and also the color of the Cyan logo dot.

The hex value for each color contains four identical digits and two that don't match. The non-matching digits are always a valid ASCII identifier for a letter. In order of appearance, these are 77=w, 63=c, 7A=z, 71=q, 58=X, 72=r, 62=b, 4F=O, 64=d. The four matching digits from each color are distinct values 1-9. When arranged in ascending numerical sequence by these digits, rather than by chronological appearance, the letters form the string "OdqXzwcbr". If entered as a directory (in place of worlds) it gives hiredark.com/OdqXzwcbr which at first was a blank page and now redirects to obduct.me

== Sites to Watch for Clues ==

[http://obductiongame.com/ OBDUCTION website] (in the video)

[https://www.facebook.com/CyanGames Cyan's Facebook Page]

[http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/ Reddit]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts Obduction Kickstarter Updates]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/cyaninc/comments Cyan Comments on Kickstarter]

[https://twitter.com/cyanworlds Cyan on Twitter]

[https://twitter.com/ryanwarzecha/ Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) on Twitter]

[http://cyan.com/ Cyan website]

[https://www.pinterest.com/cyaninc/ Cyan on Pinterest]

[https://mobile.twitter.com/obduction Obduction on Twitter]

== All Cyan Posts ==

A reference section, these are all posts by Cyanists leading up to and throughout the Kickstarter campaign. This might give some clues on how they think and where their posts might appear. Also, some of the clues might still be relevant to later puzzles. Unless otherwise stated, all of the posts & statements quoted below are from the [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28 Looking Forward to that Kickstarter ;)] thread on the Cyan forums.

Sep 10: Eric A Anderson (edoublea) [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151380233143078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page under “Photos of Cyan Inc.” with the comment, "...I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, and I must admit however, such conjecture is futile..." Ainia speculates it has something to do with an outside project of Eric's, The Witness. edoublea replies, "Nope. Think '''FARTHER'''." Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=405#p405 posts], "However Montana has some nice trees, ever think of looking over there?" greydragon will later [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=664#p664 post] "Montana means nothing - The quote on the first one has nothing to do with this game... We just wanted you to read it all the way through and say... 'the ending has not yet been written'"

Sep 15: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151391065353078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page with the comment, "Unbounded in its ken..." Zardoz [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=495#p495 posts] "The quote is from a Robert Gambol poem (The Beauties of the Universe, 1732, partially reproduced below):"

Sep 16: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=528#p528 posts], "Unbounded in its ken, from prison free / Will clearly view what here we darkly see: / Those planetary worlds, and thousands more, / Now veil’d from human sight, it shall explore." and "Maybe there are more levels to this than you know." with the word "levels" fading in color. Zardoz speculates "I think the point of "levels" is the shades of grey - which is to say that eaa is telling us the poem itself is important" and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=533#p533 replies], "Perhaps. Or maybe you need to make an adjustment to your thinking."

Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=538#p538 posts an image] which, after various image processing things with the exposure and contrast, reveals hidden letters.

Samsbase wonders about the first image and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=546#p546 replies] "Or maybe.... just maybe... eaa didn't embed anything in the first one, because he didn't realize people wanted so desperately to FIND things, and has since remedied that with the follow-ups. But you can keep digging, if you really want to." all in tiny font except for the "keep digging." This turns out to be simply a reference to planting seeds.

Sep 17: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151393080463078&id=9225241363 posts] an image on Cyan's Facebook page with the comment, "...and each step will be made in the wink of an eye." which is from The Wizard of Oz. Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=548#p548 posts] the quote.

edoublea [http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/1mk5wk/cyan_dropping_new_image_hints/ posts] on Reddit: "A wild clue has appeared! http://imgur.com/7KujlVh Enjoy. ;}" and greydragon posts on his personal Facebook page, "Reddit is fun ;)" Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=590#p590 posts] about these and begins the speculation. Madhatt3r deciphers the wingdings in the image to read "walking shark" and Rehvaro [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=597#p597 posts] "Why a Stegosaurus ? Why a Graph ? Why "No!" ? Maybe it's a "rebus": Stego + No! + Graph = Steganography ?" Several people try different things with stenography sites, but get nowhere. Zib figures out that "walking shark" means mobilefish.com, tries the image there and gets [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=632#p632 an image of a seed] with the words, "Prepate to be scattered." edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=644#p644 posts], "Dang it. That's what I get for not spell-checking my ominous clues before cryptographically encoding them in abstact sneak-peek images. I promus to spel bettr next tyme."

Madhatt3r [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=673#p673 posts] an image of the two images together which appears to be a plant sprouting from a seed.

Sep 28: <@LemonLime> (Eric) posts in Cyan Chat: "x6yoZIW Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains." Ahlisendar [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=845#p845 posts the image] and Buzzle1 [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=846#p846 posts] an excerpt from The Road by Cormac McCarthy which includes the quote posted by LemonLime as well as "Maps and mazes."

Oct 2: [http://www.inlander.com/spokane/writing-the-next-age/Content?oid=2194852 Inlander article about Myst 20th Anniversary] mentions Cyan's plans to launch a Kickstarter soon and Rand offers the teaser, "A white picket fence and an old farmhouse on a strange and alien world, without explanation for how they arrived."

Oct 5: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=914#p914 posts] "Since everyone gave up... http://www.devfarm.it/steganography/" The players now try the images and various passwords in this site, but without luck.

Oct 6: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=924#p924 posts] that the site doesn't seem to be working, apologizes and gives the answer: "The password was "mazes", from that Cormac McCarthy quote. Rather than watch everyone fight with a broken PHP error, I'm just going to leave the decrypted payload image right here...http://imgur.com/PR0LeZP"

Oct 6: LemonLime posts in CyanChat: "/a/JJNoN I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along." Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=928#p928 posts] the image and an excerpt from "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard which includes the line quoted by LemonLime as well as the word, "imperfections" which was the key Zib used with mobilefish to find a new [http://i.imgur.com/zCDTvtZ.jpg image] which appeared to be a Magic Eye puzzle. The players were able to see letters in the image and finally work out "ODUCTiN." Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=947#p947 posts] that his brother remembered something Rand said at Mysterium 2009: "…there was a project called Abduction which was more of a single player game..."

Oct 10: Shahneer [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=989#p989 posts] about discovering an image with the word "Obduction" on the DRC site.
Oct 12: WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1023#p1023 posts] a partial image of what he captured from the DRC site.

Oct 13: Buzzle1 discovers [http://redditmetrics.com/r/Obduction] which links to a [http://www.reddit.com/r/Obduction/comments/1odh0k/you_guys_waste_no_time/ post on Reddit] by edoublea: "You guys waste no time. And for that, your reward: http://i.imgur.com/oRTaRx3.jpg"

Oct 14: Trekluver posts a link to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obduction Obduction wikipedia article] and WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1052#p1052 posts] the full image of what he captured from the DRC site. andys1376 discovers the [http://obductiongame.com/ Obduction website]

Oct 15: Chogon [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1068&f=5#p1068 posts] an announcement about an upcoming forum outage and update which includes the line, "And 3) I hope this doesn't interfere with the timing of the … what's that? Gotta go."

Oct 16: rivenwanderer discovers an [https://twitter.com/obduction Obduction Twitter account].

Obduction ARG

2013-11-10T04:29:28Z

Ccstat: /* Obduction Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Progress */ Expanded the overview to give some context.

== Obduction Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Progress ==

In late August, Cyan Worlds, Inc. began releasing hints and clues to what would later be revealed to be their new game project, Obduction. Prior to the Kickstarter campaign, several images were teased in encrypted form. These images were mostly screenshots from the then-unreleased Kickstarter trailer and included letters from the name Obduction, hinting at the title. (See the "All Cyan Posts" section below for specifics). 
With the beginning of the Kickstarter campaign, Cyan released clues through the kickstarter material and surrounding promotional activity that have so far led to several websites. This segment of the ARG is ongoing. Broadly, clues in the kickstarter video led to a website called hiredark.com, which has several sub-directories with various clues. These clues have since led to the site obduct.me.

== The Three Words ==

During the Kickstarter video for the game, three words are displayed.

* 3:20 - yellowbrick
* 3:23 - firelight
* 4:05 - germinate

When these words were discovered, and subsequently entered at the Cyan forums, the ("swear-word") filter changed the words to:

* yellowbrick: is.gd
* firelight: odu
* germinate: tol

This was found to be a short URL link: http://is.gd/odutol

The shortlink led to a YouTube video with the title ''4/3 π r3'', uploaded by user ''Chester C''.

== YouTube Video ==

The title of the video is the formula for finding the volume of a sphere.

The video is three seconds long, cycling through images of different round or spherical objects.

The audio of the video (a series of high-pitched beeping sounds) was found to contain a [http://www.texturu.org/share/images/cyan-qr.jpg QR Code] leading to the site http://hiredark.com.

== Hiredark ==
The site hiredark.com simulates the appearance of a Linux/Unix shell (terminal) running a count-down timer. The timer is scripted in (dynamic) PHP, which generates a Javascript script. The units of the timer appear to be milliseconds, and the timer itself appears to be counting down to January 6, 2014. In addition, the script is coded to display the message "You do not have sufficient permission to cancel this process." if the user attempts to "end" the counter from the simulated command line using the key combination CTRL+C.

== A hint from Cyan ==
In their [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/648330 Kickstarter Update #12] Cyan gave a hint at the bottom of the update: '''"/words/<AMA>"'''.

By appending the hiredark URL with "/words/", it was found that http://hiredark.com/words/ is a valid page, but no access granted.

Having a look again to the [http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ozzcx/rand_miller_here_cocreator_of_myst_riven_got_a/ reddit AMA page], it was suspicious that Rand Miller used the word "swell" really often in his welcome message.

Adding "swell" to the URL again gave a valid page which contains sort of a poem: http://hiredark.com/words/swell/ (See section "The Poem", below, for full text and source.)

== The Poem ==
When it was discovered on November 1, 2013, the page http://hiredark.com/words/swell/ contained the text of an apparently "nonsense" poem. Searching for the text of the strange poem using a search engine revealed that the text was derived from the poetry of Walt Whitman, specifically the poem [http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/on_the_beach_at_night_alone.html "On the Beach at Night Alone"]. As one can see, every fourth word from this poem is used to derive the Cyan versions of it.

On November 2, after a hint from Rand in an [http://www.twitch.tv/ingamechat/b/476050041 In-Game Chat interview] ("'''/words/<update#6>'''"), a new page was found, http://hiredark.com/words/surprise/. These words are also every fourth word of the Whitman poem, but with an offset of -1 compared to the /swell words (that is, each word in /surprise is the word in Whitman just before the word used in /swell.)

Later on November 2, two additional pages were discovered, at http://www.hiredark.com/words/add-on/ and http://www.hiredark.com/words/name/ . These pages contained the rest of the words to the Whitman poem, with an offset of -3 and -2 respectively from the first page discovered.

After reconstructing the poem through these pages, it was discovered that one word was different from the original - "shades" instead of "worlds" in verse 8.

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Whitman's "On the Beach at Night Alone"
|-
|
:On the ''beach'' '''at''' night alone, 
:''As'' '''the''' old mother ''sways'' '''her''' to and ''fro'' '''singing''' her husky ''song,'' 
:'''As''' I watch ''the'' '''bright''' stars shining, ''I'' '''think''' a thought ''of'' '''the''' clef of ''the'' '''universes''' and of ''the'' '''future.''' 
: 
:A vast ''similitude'' '''interlocks''' all, 
:All ''spheres,'' '''grown,''' ungrown, small, ''large,'' '''suns,''' moons, planets, 
:''All'' '''distances''' of place ''however'' '''wide,''' 
:All distances ''of'' '''time,''' all inanimate ''forms,'' 
:'''All''' souls, all ''living'' '''bodies''' though they ''be'' '''ever''' so different, ''or'' '''in''' different worlds, 
:''All'' '''gaseous,''' watery, vegetable, ''mineral'' '''processes,''' the fishes, ''the'' '''brutes,''' 
:All nations, ''colors,'' '''barbarisms,''' civilizations, languages, 
:''All'' '''identities''' that have ''existed'' '''or''' may exist ''on'' '''this''' globe, or ''any'' '''globe,''' 
:All lives ''and'' '''deaths,''' all of ''the'' '''past,''' present, future, 
:''This'' '''vast''' similitude spans ''them,'' '''and''' always has ''spann'd,'' 
:'''And''' shall forever ''span'' '''them''' and compactly ''hold'' '''and''' enclose them. 
|}

(The bold and italic faces only emphasize the connections between the versions, and are not original to the Whitman poem.)

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! hiredark.com/words/add-on/
! hiredark.com/words/name/
! hiredark.com/words/surprise
! hiredark.com/words/swell
|-
|
On night 
old to her 
I stars a clef and 
 
A all, 
ungrown, moons, 
of 
All all 
souls, though so different 
watery, the 
All civilizations, 
that may globe, 
All all present, 
similitude always 
shall and enclose 
|
<center>
the alone, 
mother and husky 
watch shining, thought of of 
 
vast 
All small, planets, 
place 
distances inanimate 
all they different, '''shades,''' 
vegetable, fishes, 
nations, languages, 
have exist, or 
lives of future, 
spans has 
forever compactly them. 
</center>
|
beach 
As sways fro, song, 
the I of the the 
 
similitude 
spheres, large, 
All however 
of forms, 
living be or 
All mineral the 
colors, 
All existed, on any 
and the 
This them, spann'd, 
span hold 
|
<center>
at 
the her singing 
As bright think the universes, future. 
 
interlocks 
grown, suns, 
distances wide, 
time, 
All bodies, ever in 
gaseous, processes, brutes, 
barbarisms, 
identities or this globe, 
deaths, past, 
vast and 
And them and 
</center>
|-
| <center>each 4th word, offset -3</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -2</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset -1</center>
| <center>each 4th word, offset 0</center>
|}

== Worlds ==
Guessing that "words" could be a misspelling, simply trying to browse to http://hiredark.com/worlds/ revealed that this opens a page as well; a page with a pure black background and nothing else in it.

Either once this link was posted in the Cyan forums (assuming Cyan employees watching the progress in the thread) - or by simply refreshing the content of the browser (assuming there is some automated mechanism updating content) - had the effect that the page now contained a small circle. This circle was an image named "worlds.png" (circle color = #667766).

Already earlier is was observed that the dot-color of Cyan's logo slightly changed from a bright cyan (#00d8ff) to a color with hex value #667766.

Once it was posted in the forums that now the content of http://hiredark.com/worlds/ had changed, it was observed that the content already changed again; this time the color of the circle changed to #637777, and the png image was replaced by an svg version.

It was observed later that the color changed again, this time to #55557A. The dot-color in the Cyan logo changed accordingly each time.

After the four portions of the Walt Whitman poem were discovered, a discrepancy was noted in the /words/name/ portion of the poetry. Where the word "worlds" should have appeared, there was instead the word "shades" (see above table). Upon attempting the url http://www.hiredark.com/worlds/shades/ , yet another page was discovered which had not one but four circles, each in a different color. In the next few days two more have been added, for a total of six circles arranged horizontally. The colors of these have hex values of 667766, 637777, 55557A, 333371, 445844 and 729999. It is also noted that the color of the newest circle always matched the colors that have appeared on the /worlds/ page and also the color of the Cyan logo dot.

== Sites to Watch for Clues ==

[http://obductiongame.com/ OBDUCTION website] (in the video)

[https://www.facebook.com/CyanGames Cyan's Facebook Page]

[http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/ Reddit]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts Obduction Kickstarter Updates]

[http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/cyaninc/comments Cyan Comments on Kickstarter]

[https://twitter.com/cyanworlds Cyan on Twitter]

[https://twitter.com/ryanwarzecha/ Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) on Twitter]

[http://cyan.com/ Cyan website]

[https://www.pinterest.com/cyaninc/ Cyan on Pinterest]

[https://mobile.twitter.com/obduction Obduction on Twitter]

== All Cyan Posts ==

A reference section, these are all posts by Cyanists leading up to and throughout the Kickstarter campaign. This might give some clues on how they think and where their posts might appear. Also, some of the clues might still be relevant to later puzzles. Unless otherwise stated, all of the posts & statements quoted below are from the [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28 Looking Forward to that Kickstarter ;)] thread on the Cyan forums.

Sep 10: Eric A Anderson (edoublea) [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151380233143078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page under “Photos of Cyan Inc.” with the comment, "...I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, and I must admit however, such conjecture is futile..." Ainia speculates it has something to do with an outside project of Eric's, The Witness. edoublea replies, "Nope. Think '''FARTHER'''." Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=405#p405 posts], "However Montana has some nice trees, ever think of looking over there?" greydragon will later [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=664#p664 post] "Montana means nothing - The quote on the first one has nothing to do with this game... We just wanted you to read it all the way through and say... 'the ending has not yet been written'"

Sep 15: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151391065353078&set=o.9225241363&type=1 posts] an image on Cyan’s Facebook page with the comment, "Unbounded in its ken..." Zardoz [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=495#p495 posts] "The quote is from a Robert Gambol poem (The Beauties of the Universe, 1732, partially reproduced below):"

Sep 16: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=528#p528 posts], "Unbounded in its ken, from prison free / Will clearly view what here we darkly see: / Those planetary worlds, and thousands more, / Now veil’d from human sight, it shall explore." and "Maybe there are more levels to this than you know." with the word "levels" fading in color. Zardoz speculates "I think the point of "levels" is the shades of grey - which is to say that eaa is telling us the poem itself is important" and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=533#p533 replies], "Perhaps. Or maybe you need to make an adjustment to your thinking."

Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=538#p538 posts an image] which, after various image processing things with the exposure and contrast, reveals hidden letters.

Samsbase wonders about the first image and edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=546#p546 replies] "Or maybe.... just maybe... eaa didn't embed anything in the first one, because he didn't realize people wanted so desperately to FIND things, and has since remedied that with the follow-ups. But you can keep digging, if you really want to." all in tiny font except for the "keep digging." This turns out to be simply a reference to planting seeds.

Sep 17: edoublea [https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151393080463078&id=9225241363 posts] an image on Cyan's Facebook page with the comment, "...and each step will be made in the wink of an eye." which is from The Wizard of Oz. Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=548#p548 posts] the quote.

edoublea [http://www.reddit.com/r/myst/comments/1mk5wk/cyan_dropping_new_image_hints/ posts] on Reddit: "A wild clue has appeared! http://imgur.com/7KujlVh Enjoy. ;}" and greydragon posts on his personal Facebook page, "Reddit is fun ;)" Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=590#p590 posts] about these and begins the speculation. Madhatt3r deciphers the wingdings in the image to read "walking shark" and Rehvaro [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=597#p597 posts] "Why a Stegosaurus ? Why a Graph ? Why "No!" ? Maybe it's a "rebus": Stego + No! + Graph = Steganography ?" Several people try different things with stenography sites, but get nowhere. Zib figures out that "walking shark" means mobilefish.com, tries the image there and gets [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=632#p632 an image of a seed] with the words, "Prepate to be scattered." edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=644#p644 posts], "Dang it. That's what I get for not spell-checking my ominous clues before cryptographically encoding them in abstact sneak-peek images. I promus to spel bettr next tyme."

Madhatt3r [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=673#p673 posts] an image of the two images together which appears to be a plant sprouting from a seed.

Sep 28: <@LemonLime> (Eric) posts in Cyan Chat: "x6yoZIW Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains." Ahlisendar [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=845#p845 posts the image] and Buzzle1 [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=846#p846 posts] an excerpt from The Road by Cormac McCarthy which includes the quote posted by LemonLime as well as "Maps and mazes."

Oct 2: [http://www.inlander.com/spokane/writing-the-next-age/Content?oid=2194852 Inlander article about Myst 20th Anniversary] mentions Cyan's plans to launch a Kickstarter soon and Rand offers the teaser, "A white picket fence and an old farmhouse on a strange and alien world, without explanation for how they arrived."

Oct 5: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=914#p914 posts] "Since everyone gave up... http://www.devfarm.it/steganography/" The players now try the images and various passwords in this site, but without luck.

Oct 6: edoublea [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=924#p924 posts] that the site doesn't seem to be working, apologizes and gives the answer: "The password was "mazes", from that Cormac McCarthy quote. Rather than watch everyone fight with a broken PHP error, I'm just going to leave the decrypted payload image right here...http://imgur.com/PR0LeZP"

Oct 6: LemonLime posts in CyanChat: "/a/JJNoN I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along." Zib_Redlektab [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=928#p928 posts] the image and an excerpt from "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard which includes the line quoted by LemonLime as well as the word, "imperfections" which was the key Zib used with mobilefish to find a new [http://i.imgur.com/zCDTvtZ.jpg image] which appeared to be a Magic Eye puzzle. The players were able to see letters in the image and finally work out "ODUCTiN." Malfhok [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=947#p947 posts] that his brother remembered something Rand said at Mysterium 2009: "…there was a project called Abduction which was more of a single player game..."

Oct 10: Shahneer [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=989#p989 posts] about discovering an image with the word "Obduction" on the DRC site.
Oct 12: WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1023#p1023 posts] a partial image of what he captured from the DRC site.

Oct 13: Buzzle1 discovers [http://redditmetrics.com/r/Obduction] which links to a [http://www.reddit.com/r/Obduction/comments/1odh0k/you_guys_waste_no_time/ post on Reddit] by edoublea: "You guys waste no time. And for that, your reward: http://i.imgur.com/oRTaRx3.jpg"

Oct 14: Trekluver posts a link to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obduction Obduction wikipedia article] and WeldFord [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1052#p1052 posts] the full image of what he captured from the DRC site. andys1376 discovers the [http://obductiongame.com/ Obduction website]

Oct 15: Chogon [http://forums.cyan.com/viewtopic.php?p=1068&f=5#p1068 posts] an announcement about an upcoming forum outage and update which includes the line, "And 3) I hope this doesn't interfere with the timing of the … what's that? Gotta go."

Oct 16: rivenwanderer discovers an [https://twitter.com/obduction Obduction Twitter account].