Email

Re: Pixel Me This, Batman!

To: Arthur Quincey ([email protected])

From: Mina Murray ([email protected])

Date: February 2, 3:02 AM

Hey, A,

Sending this as an email cuz it's late and I know you always forget to put Do Not Disturb on. Kay, so I stared at this for a thousand years, because something was weird about it. I dug out some of my old bio labs from undergrad, and the slide images were NEVER that bad. Like, so low resolution that there's no way the point could be that we were supposed to actually do anything with the sample. Then I was thinking, what if WE were supposed to be the microscope, you know? Like, in a real lab, you close up on the slide through the microscope, so maybe in the game, we're supposed to close up on the IMAGE of the slide. So I zoomed it in to the point where it was just pixels, and I realized why it looked so weird. It's too regular to be a real sample of blood. It's actually one bit of the image repeating over and over. Plus, there's no grayscale. Like, in a real slide it wouldn't be so starkly black and white.

Sooooo then I was thinking about crossword puzzles because you mentioned Sudoku (which…who would ever do Sudoku when you could do crossword puzzles?) and…okay this might be nothing but! What if it's like…a code. Like, the white pixels are 0s and the black pixels are 1s like in binary? Or another code… Because since it repeats, that seems like a code, right? Otherwise why would you have it repeat. Buuuut, I can't really get beyond that. Like, I doubt we're just supposed to enter a bunch of 1s and 0s into the clue box? Or maybe we are… Ugh, I don't want to get it wrong and trigger the timeout!

Anyhoo, if I'm right, here's the pattern:

[binary of 1s and 0s]

Let me know what you think!

m

Email

Re: Pixel Me This, Batman!

To: Mina Murray ([email protected])

From: Arthur Quincey ([email protected])

Date: February 4, 2:30 PM

Hey M—

Sorry it took me a little while to get back to you. This was definitely a doozy. I don't think I want to do a single Sudoku puzzle, crossword, ANYTHING for the next year. Not even a word search.

But I can kinda see why people are into it. It's kind of addictive, and I have to say—okay look, I'm really proud of myself for figuring this out. Because I did! First, though, I should probably tell you that one reason why it took me a while to get this to you is because I maybe…put the wrong thing in the box and we got dinged :/ I know, I'm sorry.

You were right that it was binary code, but it took me forever to figure out what it was trying to show me.

I worked on it for a while, trying to figure out what it might be. At first I thought it was an area code and phone number, but that didn't work out quite right until I added a country code. I called, like, Ukraine? (VH has a landline and an international calling plan thank god, because it would have been a lot of money oops.) Anyway, I tried a few different combinations and nada. Also I think it's not an *unlimited* international calling plan, so.

Then I decided it wasn't a phone number and I worked on it some more (I thought maybe it was a social security number but that seemed a bit excessive, even for Allium).

I came up with:

591119601206

That I translated to a date and time stamp—06-19-2016-1159 (which is June 19th, 2016, 11:59). I figured out how a timestamp was translated by looking at a file of a picture I took with my phone and emailed to myself, which was: [format].

That's what I put in the answer box aaaaand…we got dinged

I was really cranky about this, and I didn't want to admit that I caused a delay. VH thought I was being ridiculous about that, but he also told me to stop obsessing over this string of numbers and do something else. I did so, very enthusiastically, while I was at his house. When I was at home, I was still obsessing, and doing it on chat. Then I realized my adorably luddite boyfriend didn't have—are you ready for this—a WIRELESS ROUTER, so anytime we, ah, wanted to have naughty chat time, he had to sit at his desk in his home office. Hello, not acceptable.

You're probably thinking, "Arthur, get to the point and stop talking about your sex life." But the thing is, the next day I went over to install his new wireless router (I've sold him on chat sex, which was NO EASY FEAT but I'll spare your lesbian ears the details of so much dick, you're welcome) and that's when it hit me.

IT'S NOT A TIME STAMP—it's an IP Address.

The IP address is 216.59.96.111 (I was wrong about the zeros—whatever)

It's a website, and on it is a single downloadable mp3 file. I've attached it to this email. It appears to be a drunk girl talking about how she's waiting for an Uber in the Garden District after a nice bartender walked her out of the Quarter. No idea what it wants as an answer, but I'm passing this one off to you and your gf because…well, now that VH figured out wireless and has a portable laptop we have some things to do >>

(Which is him grading papers, ugh, dating a professor during the school year.)

[attachment: vm.mp3]