New guy in the funhouse

New text:

New guy in the funhouse! Want 2 know how he got bagged? A text the Company snagged. Could u have cracked it? Check email or 9thWonders.

Corresponding e-mail, with the subject "New guy in the funhouse":

Well, there's a new guy in the funhouse! (See here - http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/novels/novels_display.shtml?novel=96) Want to know how he got bagged? A text message the Company snagged. Could you have cracked it? Here's what they intercepted:

"I used MY code this time. cprn ewh tutq mk iooab loaz tilbf I jqq nub xnue ghkg poatq hgzz suurotm V as abrxg V dol aoz cadkzftgvq I sqfs ewh bglyy O pnvk ab mgvl qamftowas O pbpk gbu gzr oqil I gu bkgg wuyb fcgzrd O iz szilito nt ewhr vieetb'f cgjvn ov Nrxwjhkiq Mkmg mk euet gbu iia I cqyl hm jaobvnm Q yobm loa"

ETA: Solution in the comments for this post.

Brendan (Lewis) Palmer's Profile

Brendan Lewis now has a profile (Subject C020) viewable in the Assignment Tracker at the Primatech Paper website. In the title bar, he is named "Brendan Palmer," but later in the profile he is mentioned as "Brendan Lewis." You may recall that the recent "The Kill Squad" graphic novels show him in action, as Donna and Thompson try to "bag and tag" him.

The password was found via a puzzle (view here): BLjtd19f

His profile lists him as a Caucasian American male from Saratoga Springs, Utah, born December 20, 1979. He is described as 6' 0" with a medium build, and as having a fair complexion and brown hair. There are no mentioned aliases, his weight is listed as n/a, and he has no scars or marks. He is listed as unemployed.

His ability is confirmed as "Plant manipulation, Regeneration":

Able to control and alter organic plant matter. Adaptive DNA mimics a variety of vegetation habits such as: cellular regeneration, UV energy absorption, and a telekinetic influence over nearby plant life.

Personal History:

Brendan Lewis grew up in Saratoga Springs. While a teenager, he discovered that he could slightly manipulate plants to grow faster. Soon after manifesting, he was bagged and tagged by Thompson Sr., then released back into society. Lewis spent the next two years attempting to evade surveillance. During that time, Lewis's ability developed to the point where he would manipulate medium-sized plants and roots. Tissue samples revealed that he also experienced increased healing. Thompson was able to recover Lewis outside of Boulder, Colorado. Lewis spent a year in a Company lab as extensive study was made of the limits of his powers. While being moved from a Level 2 to a Level 3 holding cell, Lewis was able to escape (see PXIR-9961 for incident analysis). At the time, Lewis was not considered a priority threat. Eventually, Lewis was sighted in Palmer, West Virginia, leading to his recovery by Agents Dunlap and Thompson in the nearby ghost town of Silver River.

During the recovery operation, it became clear that Lewis' powers had unexpectedly accelerated in development during his separation from the Company. Brendan Lewis is now considered a Level 5 powered individual. His cellular structure and biological systems are more plant-like than animal, and he exhibits extreme regenerative properties. He absorbs energy from photosynthesis and exhibits complete control over any plant life in his immediate vicinity. His known weaknesses include fire and herbicide.

Agents should note that Lewis has a highly negative stance toward the Company specifically and will react in a uniformly hostile manner toward any agents or staff. Also, Lewis' mutation continues to grow and intensify, and he should be monitored closely for additional, dangerous capabilities. (Sentence omitted: Classified)

Psychological Profile:

The subject exhibits moderate passive-aggressive tendencies, as well as early indicators for paranoid schizophrenia, the latter possibly exacerbated by his species transition and by the fact that he really is being followed by people who intend to conduct experiments upon him.

Communication patterns continue to evolve as his primary social focus shifts to the plant life around him, but all recent interaction with the Company suggests all classic comorbid conditions, including clinical depression and anxiety. Allowed to persist in the wild, the subject would likely experience a high degree of social dysfunction such as long-term unemployment, homelessness and possibly suicide.

Descramble - The Company gets coy

New text:

New AT profile up.The Company is getting a little coy w/security.This make sense?
qC6?52?{6H:Dq{;E5`h79EEAi^^HHH]AC:>2E649A2A6C]4@>^p%0a]_^2DD:8?>6?E%C

The corresponding e-mail, with the subject "Descramble":

The Company just posted a new AT profile. They've been getting a little coy with security now that they suspect a mole. I think this is the AT profile password, but they want us to work for it: qC6?52?{6H:Dq{;E5`h79EEAi^^HHH]AC:>2E649A2A6C]4@>^p%0a]_^2DD:8?>6?E%C24<6C]A9A

Access Assignment Tracker here: http://www.primatechpaper.com/AT_2.0/assignmentTracker.php.

We can cheat and go to the new profile via direct link: here. However, that does not solve the puzzle.

---

ETA: Congrats to droxnar711 for solving the puzzle!

It is a shift cypher and uses a Mod95 alphabet.
EVS gave us the key - the last part of the message:

http://www.primatechpaper.com/AT_2.0/assignmentTracker.php
9EEAi^^HHH]AC:>2E649A2A6C]4@>^p%0a]_^2DD:8?>6?E%C24<6C]A9A

The first part is his name:
BrendanLewis
qC6?52?{6H:D

and the part in between is the password:
BLjtd19f
q{;E5`h7

Jigsaw puzzle

New text message:

I've been picking through the trash at the Company. Like jigsaw puzzles? Check this out: www.9thwonders.com/scan.jpg

---

ETA: New e-mail, with the subject "Taking out the trash":

So the shredder is out on the next floor. Somebody has been making do with scissors and their friendly neighborhood trash can. (Don't ask how I know this.)

Do you like jigsaw puzzles? Good... Check this out: http://www.9thwonders.com/scan.jpg

---

ETA: The solution, courtesy of PLabrozzi, may be found below:

Donna Dunlap

Kudos to Michael for figuring out the solution to the recent texts from our mystery informant:

April 1 text -
"I had a girl _ was her name. Since she left me, I've never been the same."
This is "Donna" from the song by Ritchie Valens in 1958.

April 8 text -
“I'm a small village located in Peoria County, Illinois.”

After a brief search on Wikipedia, there is a list of villages in Peoria. In each bio, they are mentioned as villages but only in Dunlap is it mentioned as a small village.

Putting the two clues together shows that Evs is pointing us to the name Donna Dunlap.

Chuck Kim confirms this result in an article (**WARNING: This article contains 360/Evolutions spoilers**) for Entertainment Weekly

Novel #30: String Theory; Hiro's 'final' e-mail

Today's new graphic novel gives us some insight into Future Hiro, his "timeline" in Isaac's loft, and the meaning behind "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World".

*Spoiler Warning* While many of the graphic novels simply expand the plot, this one contains what could be considered a big spoiler.

Btw, if you were looking for your screenname in last week's novel, and couldn't find it -- check out the hidden page in this novel. It has the complete image, without the text boxes.

---

Also: I'm not sure that this is the full solution to Hiro's recent blog post, but over at Hiro's blog Violet pointed out that today (4/24) is Charlie's birthday. E-mail to charliea@primatechpaper.com triggers this reply:

Hana,

This might be my final message to you. After many years, I finally
found the target time! October 4, 2006. The chain reaction that this
will cause should fix all that has gone wrong. Should being the
operative word. This is our only hope. It's ironic that Trunks wrote
those words on his time machine. I now know how he felt.

This rift is not a risk. It can't be. I've been working on it for
years to find the right moment. It's been a herculean effort. The
last five years have led up to this.

I can't believe it's finally over. I can save the world. Well, at
least in one timeline.

If I don't return, I have failed in my mission. Get rid of everything
in the loft. Clean it out. You, must continue. Keep hope alive and
may the world be a better place. Please.

For Charlie,
Hiro

ETA: Thanks to Slyder for expanding on this result, by noting that Charlie loved crossword puzzles and her blood clot could be considered "death row."

From Hana: brianundaunted

New text from Hana:

"I found him, but I don't know what it all means. www.samantha48616e61.com" has more, but I need your kind of mind to keep going."

New post at Hana's blog:

"I'm pretty sure that this our man: http://brianundaunted.imeem.com

From what I can gather, he's Linderman's top engineer and the brains behind the new voting system. I think he may have buried information on his profile that can lead to one or more of the codes I need to access the backend of the voting tool so we can stop them from rigging the election.

I know that some of you haven't heard from me yet, but you will. Keep an eye out for me. I'm everywhere. HG"

---

Many thanks to kzanth for pointing out this: http://www.youtube.com/brianundaunted can be found via the missing letters in his Shakespeare quote which spell out "look in my youtube".

Within a post at his YouTube, he has posted:

Okay, I've already deleted my amazing webcam collection, so the only reason you'd be here is if you figured out where to look by reading my blog, which means nothing more than you've got the problem-solving ability of the average gerbil, but hey, congrats anyway, here's your piece of cheese or whatever the hell gerbils eat: MIRROR, MINUS ONES

Look pointless to you? That's because it is. Unless you find out the number to apply it to, at which point it becomes the most valuable password you've ever eye-fondled in your life. Unfortunately for you, the missing number is hidden somewhere on my Flickr page. And where is that? I'll be nice this time and give you the first part: http://www.flickr.com/photos/_ ______/ What goes in the blank? Why, the next step in the following sequence!: 6 = 16 = 1116 = 3116 = 132116 = _______

Yeah, yeah, I'm a pain in the butt, right? Well, guess what, trying to figure out why you meatbags think like you do is ten times as hard.

Keep bidding.

6 = 16 = 1116 = 3116 = 132116 = 31131216
(say the sequence aloud, you'll get it), so we find:
http://flickr.com/photos/31131216 (thanks pepper)

Check out the boat image, on the boat it says: 38 2x SLC
Mirrored, this is: CLSx283 Minus 1 from each number, and we get: CLSx172
This is our first code (also found in the Two Screen in January).

---

Back to the orignal link at http://brianundaunted.imeem.com. Within the post "Res IPsum Loquitar" he says:

Three clues to what you're looking for, where it is, and what it does...
1) By Bells, by Trumpets, by Lights and Torches, by the report of Muskets, I can be executed with any object at all, provided the object is capable of a positional notation with a radix of 2.
2) preachtim, sonica, havicer
3) Ringo says John, Paul, George are keeping secrets!!

1. As Jak pointed out, this refers to binary
2. "preachtim, sonica, havicer" can be anagrammed to: "primatech, casino, archive"
3. John, Paul, George = JPG, something is hidden in an image

In Linderman's archive, we find that the 22nd image, "The President Stands Alone" has binary code printed over it.
On the "About" page at the Casino, the image of the roulette wheel also has binary.
The third set of binary can be found at the Titan Club page, over the bar image.

All together, translated to text, it reveals a message:

"Congratulations you have just found a very important piece of information:
2007:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a3e:0270:7234"

There was a lot of speculation over where to go from here, but... Congrats to Charly over at 9thWonders for figuring out that this IS last code!
Kudos and thanks to all who have been working on this. Thanks to Rocco and Mike for their e-mail updates.

---

So the codes are:

1. CLSx172
2. Lac Long Quan
3. 2007:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a3e:0270:7234

New info from Hana: the Lonestar files

New post at Hana's blog, posted a few minutes ago:

I risked everything to smuggle the Lonestar files out of the Pentagon. I posted them below because I think they may contain hidden information that leads to one of the codes to get inside the voting system.

Please don't spread these files widely - it could be dangerous.

And if you didn't receive an instruction from me, hang tight. I'm working on something that could blow this thing wide open. The rest of you will hear from me shortly.

This is followed by an image which links to this page.

The images contained:
folder_photo1.jpg
folder_photo2.jpg
folder_photo3.jpg

ETA: The main folder image has been altered a bit. Here is the current version: folder.jpg

---

ETA: Interesting reading - Thanks to Dean for sending us this link. Perhaps this holds come valuable info that may help us figure out the messages in these files?

Weekend recap: real and fake of April 1st

Just a quick post to point you in the right direction, in case you didn't stop by over the weekend:

The previous post, "Get to know MMbf15zu -- new Primatech profile", was obviously a bit of April Fool's fun. I hope that you enjoyed it. I am leaving it up for your amusement, but adding a tag to avoid any confusion in the archive.
BTW, if you didn't find the "hidden messages", check out my comments on that post.

Also check out the post "New puzzle at Hiro's Blog -- SOLVED!". It contains the solution to the latest puzzle from Hiro's blog. While it's hard to believe, that was NOT a joke. That really is the solution!

New puzzle at Hiro's Blog -- SOLVED!

Many thanks to Kat3MD and Rocco for reporting that a new puzzle has appeared at Hiro's Blog.
The post is:

Captain's Log: Stardate 12288.0

To Flower

Flower,
I shall bring you a game.

Use one part-time worker at a time and for every dollar, add 3000.

0100010001110101010001000100011001001111100001000100111101001000010101110111
0101010101110100011001100001100001000110000101001000010011010111010101001101
0100011001001111010010000100110101000110010011110111010101001111010000100100
1101010001100100111101000010010011110110110001001111010000100101001110000100
0101001101001000010100110110110001011101010000100101110110000100010111010100
1000010101110100011001010111010010000100010010000100010001000100101001010111
0100100001000100010010100110111110000110010101110100101001001111010000100100
1111100001100101011110000110010011010100100001011101010000100101011101001000
0100010010000110010101111000011001101111011011000100010001110101010011010100
1000010111010110110001000100010010100110111110000100010111010110110001011101
0111010101000100011011000110111101101100010111010111010101010011011101010101
0111011011000100010001101100010100110111010101100001011011000101011101001000
0100010001000010010101111000011001011101100001000110111101110101011011110100
0110011000010110110001100001011101010100111110000110010011011000011001100001
0111010101101111100001000100110110000110010011011000010001010111010010100110
1111010001100100110110000100010011111000010001101111100001000100010001001010
0110111101101100010011010111010101000100010010100110000101001010010011111000
0100010011110100011001101111010001100101011101001010010011010111010101101111
0110110001011101100001000101001110000100010011110100011001001111011011000101
0011100001000110000110000100

The key is on the key. A picture is 5.

---

04/01/2007 UPDATE: The puzzle has been SOLVED!
Many thanks to Klajv for posting the solution. Kudos to everyone who has been working on this puzzle, especially to Klajv and the others who solved it over at Hiro's Blog!

It turns out that it was a chess game. The resulting arrangement of the pieces clearly spells out "DL". Here is the Step-by-Step description:

• "I bring you a game." -- So, here is the game:


• "Use one part time worker at a time" -- Binary has two values, 1 and 0, or "off" and "on", so they are like part-time workers.


• "For every dollar" -- A dollar = 8 bits. We need to do something to every 8-bit group (usually how binary is grouped for conversion).


• So what are we converting the binary to? We translate to hexadecimal. The hint for this was is the Stardate (12288) – as many of us noticed, which is 3000 when converted to hexadecimal.


• "Add 3000" -- We now add 3000 to each of the converted hexadecimal pairs of numbers.


• Translating the resulting 4-digit numbers to text results in Japanese Hiragana. A hint to this was that this post was marked as translated from Japanese, even though the previous one was not.


• "The key is on the key." -- Looking at a Japanese keyboard, we can find the corresponding English letters and numbers on the keys of the characters that we found.


• "A picture is 5." -- The resulting letters and numbers read like a set of chess moves. If these moves are played out on a chessboard, the "picture" that is created by the placement of the pieces spells out "DL".

So, e-mailing DLH@PrimatechPaper.com (DL Hawkins), triggers the response:

Hana,

I must minimize communications now as I discovered there is a traitor
among us. I hope to find him or her and shut the traitor down.

If you need to reach me, you can find me at 215 Reed St. #7, New York,
New York 10010.

As always, thank you for your help and please tell your partner,
"karadanikiotsuketekudasai".

For Charlie,
Hiro

P.S. Tell D.L. that he needs to get new clothes (^o^) ======

Hiro's Blog puzzle -- solved!

Congrats to texgrog, over at 9thwonders, who has solved Hiro's puzzle!

The solution is as follows...

There were two major keys to solving the puzzle:
The title of the entry, "Bound by Death and Luck", and the line "To see light again, a rift will be chanced. I grow weary of hiding on the 15. In simple times, we used a courier to tell truth."

Death and luck are represented by 4 and 7 in numerology. Courier, as many of you know, is also a text font.

Copy the blog text into an editor, set it in Courier (keep the font size at 10), and allow 47 characters per line (don't break words, if one doesn't fit into the 47 character limit, move it to the next line).
Then, read the 15th letter in each line. Downward, it reveals this message:

flower, contact me
Kaiton@primatechpaper.com

Send an e-mail to the above address, and you will get this response from Kaito Nakamura's address:

November 8, 2010

Hana,
I knew I could reach you this way. I was able to hack into the old
Yamagato server. Times may have changed but their security system is
still ancient.

It's ironic that my father's email is still active. I figured this
would be the securest way to communicate to you.

As you know we are in desperate times. I've finally found Molly
Walker. I will find others. I seek assistance from you and your
partner to provide a safe harbor.

I will not give up. I thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Safe journey and god speed.

For Charlie,
Hiro

A lot of us were on the right track. I personally kept trying to use EVERY 15th letter, then trying to anagram the results. Oh well.
Congrats and thanks again to Tex for sharing the solution!

---

ETA: Another bit of info was revealed today. To find out what Vietnam (the new password to Linderman's archive) has to do with our heroes, check out War Buddies: Unknown Soldiers, the graphic novel segment that was released today.