The problem I have with using the clue “21 goes into 1” is that it’s exactly that, a clue. It’s not supposed to be the thing we solve the gigantic puzzle with. We should be able to solve the puzzle without using that clue. I mean, after all, the clue only came up after we discovered the 752 hex code.
I am going to take attempt to take the pizza to Dr. Horn in Zen. What will happen you might ask. Probably nothing, however i am not sure on that.
I noted down all significant Chapter and Verse for each part of the bible from Old Testament to New, based on the Good News Bible that is found scattered in the office level.
Seemed the most logical step is to use that as a base point and then note all Books which has 21 Chapters and then the first Verse from each Chapter.
Its somewhere in here if i remember where about it was ill post it.
Thats the link to the Good New Bible, you’ll be able to search pretty quick which Book has 21 Chapters, and find Verse 1 for that chapter quite quick. There is only a handful of Books which have 21 Chapters.
https://www.biblegateway.com/versions/Good-News-Translation-GNT-Bible/#booklist
I’m convinced that the “21 goes into 1” clue has to do with the phrase “Tempus omnia revela[n]t”.
Storm has mentioned it at least twice (the title of the wiki page and in his post about how “time will still reveal all”). Furthermore, I really doubt that the additional “n” was accidental–if you include the “n”, then the phrase “Tempus omnia revelant” with spaces included is exactly 21 characters. In something as carefully constructed as an ARG, I have a hard time believing that this is an oversight. It’s possible, mind you–no one’s perfect–but it just seems like he would have fixed it by now if it was a fluke.
It’s also possible that the spelling is not intentional, and the 21-character phrase “timerevealseverything” (without spaces) is important.
“Time will reveal all”
“21 into 1”
Has anyone considered 21 into 1 being related to a time (not a date)?
I went through the entire Tempus page in an attempt to identify what each portion might be related to:
- Tempus Omnia Revela[n]t – Obviously, “time reveals everything”, “time reveals all things”, etc. Latin proverb.
- Vox populi vox Dei–“The voice of the people is the voice of God.” Also a Latin phrase.
- The “terminal.blackmesasource.com” page info. This was one of the first clues to the ARG’s existence.
- The “INTERCEPT” data–looks like it is in BibTeX format. Could just be included to make it more “science-y”, but there are some things to note. On the wiki page for the original TeX language, for instance, there’s this passage:
"A new version of TeX, rewritten from scratch and called TeX82, was published in 1982. Among other changes, the original hyphenation algorithm was replaced by a new algorithm written by Frank Liang. TeX82 also uses fixed-point arithmetic instead of floating-point, to ensure reproducibility of the results across different computer hardware,[sup][7][/sup] and includes a real, Turing-complete programming language, following intense lobbying by Guy Steele.[sup][8][/sup]In 1989, Donald Knuth released new versions of TeX and METAFONT.[sup][9][/sup] Despite his desire to keep the program stable, Knuth realised that 128 different characters for the text input were not enough to accommodate foreign languages; the main change in version 3.0 of TeX is thus the ability to work with 8-bit inputs, allowing 256 different characters in the text input."
The “Turing-complete” portion refers to Turing, who is important due to his Turing test (wherein an AI is tested to see if it is indistinguishable from human intelligence) and his involvement with cryptography (including solving the German Enigma cipher during WWII).The portion about the characters is interesting, too (although possibly coincidental) because it mentions 128/256 characters and 8-bit inputs, thereby possibly making it related to our potential encryption method.
- IRC Clue #1, which pointed us to the correction on Stormseeker’s website–led to Konami code being used and uncovering “terminal.blackmesasource.com”
- List of niobium isotopes, which we have determined is likely related to the construction of the HALOS AI. Also references HAFB from IRC Clue # 3 regarding the transfer of 41Nb. The 41 is the atomic number of niobium.
- Quote: "“It is one thing to communicate with something mysterious but it is quite another to be silently observed by it. I am concerned whether it understands the same concept of reason that we do.” From Star Trek episode “Justice” wherein the Edo god communicates with Data.
- “Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi.” Verse from Dante’s Inferno shouted by Nimrod. Often interpreted as confusion of languages after the Tower of Babel fell, as noted in the wiki article. This is also a Latin text, which is the third reference to the Latin language on the page.
[b]Anyone else think it’s possible that our key is in Latin? Why else have all these references to Latin and languages? I’m also curious as to why we are being referred back to the start of the ARG. Coupled with Storm’s insistence we revisit the story, I feel like we’re overlooking something or missing a chunk of information we forgot to pick up along the way.
EDIT: I’m really starting to feel like we would benefit more from a paring of information versus new clues. We have far too much stuff–6 IRC clues, multiple web pages with messages, a page with at least 8 references, many PMs and hints left by Storm himself, and the files on Stormseeker’s site (and the messages within). And all for (apparently) one code. Mind-numbing, to say the least.
[/b]
Just for kicks and giggles, the phrase “the pizza is a lie” can be translated to the following.
“the pizza” = “Neapolitanam”, which literally means “from Napoli”. Makes sense given its history, as it was invented in Naples.
“is” = “est”, a form of the verb “esse” (to be) which is often dropped unless its tense or person is important to understanding the sentence.
“a lie” = “mendacium”.
Basically, “Neapolitanam est mendacium”, or shortened to “Neapolitanam mendacium”. Drop the single space, and you get “Neapolitanammendacium”… which is 21 characters long.
This was just for fun. Sorry.
This is probably nothing, but I figured I’d mention it. In a previous post, I converted the hex code into UTF-8 using this online decoder. What I really like about this tool is that it identifies the name of each character, the UTF-8 representation, and even which byte number it is.
After doing the same decode, I noticed that it prefixes the letter notations with the word “latin”–which makes sense, seeing as how they are derivatives. However, this coupled with the sheer amount of them got me wondering. Many of the symbols are listed as " characters" by the decoder, thereby rendering them pretty useless in UTF-8 (they do have ASCII representations that UTF-8 won’t match). The rest are numbers, a few symbols from other languages, and a couple of common symbols. Here it is again:
+�:5fW|$OCF1K/“aWw$y#!,.ògEaQN3q10($=TDbٿ9~C2xO]iuIbYZc=>:8E5Aȃ2/�(bOjQd:,.8�yYmHǹScDau$,؏Q֕Qj|{@I"A0f̳9F:~7?x1y~y@eFLb&*KX7_sī”)q36GJ(֏Ti^[PgFvZo%ޤ@eE$i6=!Z)6+]
What I did was go through and pick out all the numbers and the letters prefixed with the word “latin”:
Numbers:
51310928528097173666
Letters:
fwocFKaWwyògEaQNqTDbCxOiuIbYZcEȃbOjQDyYmHǹScDauQQjIAfFxyyeFLbKXsīqGJTiPgFvZoeEiZ
As you can see, there are quite a few letters. Perhaps I’m not understanding the different encodes 100%, but it looks to me like it’s possible that the other symbols were simply added to manufacturer the high entropy, then encoded with hex to give it the appearance of ciphertext.
The most interesting thing to me, though, is that the sequence of numbers ends with 666–as we all know, that’s the devil’s number. I can’t help but think this is related to all the Satan/Lucifer references. Coincidence? Hmmm . . . .
“Latin” would refer to the alphabet the characters come from. The letters used in English, Spanish, German, French, etc. are Latin characters, where as the letters used in a language like Russian are from the Cyrillic alphabet.
Right–I guess I could have been more clear. Rather than go through and try to find them all by sight, I simply went down the listing created by that decoder and Ctrl + F’d all the instances of “latin”. This provided the list of only letters.
The Numbers are also 20 Characters Long, if you pad that with a 0 at the start, that’s 21 numbers.
Do you mean like a time interval or a specific time of day?
The problem is that we have two slightly different wordings of the hint: “21 into 1” and “21 goes into 1”. For example, “21 into 1” could mean 1:21 a.m., 1 hour 21 minutes, or 1 minute 21 seconds, 1 day 21 hours, etc. “21 goes into 1” seems to be more an expression denoting division: 1/21. Or, maybe 21 units of one kind goes into 1 (larger?) unit of a different kind. But the fraction 1/21 could also be a time interval, for example 1/21 seconds, 1/21 minutes, … A time interval could also indicate a frequency.
This may be nothing, but in the heading for the intercept data (“INTERCEPT 099.00//a”), directly above the BibTeX section, there is what looks like a version number. It looks suspiciously similar to BibTeX version numbers, the most recent version being 0.99d. In the changelog, the following is written about version 0.99a:
% Version 0.99a was released in January 1988. Its main changes: allowed the
% inclusion of entire .bib files (rather than just those entries
% \cited or \nocited); made the sorting algorithm stable; eliminated
% any case conversion for file names; allowed concatenation in database
% fields and string definitions; handled hyphenated names properly;
% handled accented characters properly; implemented new empty$,
% preamble$, text.length$, text.prefix$, and warning$ built-in functions;
% allowed a new cross-referencing feature; and made many minor fixes,
% including about a 40% speed-up on TOPS-20.There are a couple of interesting things here that seem strangely relevant:
- “case conversion”, e.g., ThePizzaisaLIE -> ThEpIzZaIsaLiE
- “hyphenated names”, e.g., Benaloh-Paillier, Goldwasser–Micali, etc.
- “accented characters”. The verse from Dante’s Inferno, “Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi.”, contains several accented characters. Could it be that we need to replace some of the characters in the key with their accented equivalents, e.g., replace 'e’s with 'è’s, 'i’s with 'í’s, etc. ?
Panis focacius est mendacium![/size]
The pizza didn’t exist in Ancient Rome. The closest thing to a pizza might have been a bread product called panis focacius (or focaccia in Italian), which many believe was the early prototype of what would later evolve into the pizza.
EDIT: The term panis focacius is derived from the Latin words panis meaning “bread”, and focus meaning “hearth, fireplace.”
Wait, isn’t there a few clocks in game in a few chapters? I noticed a few in the chapters “Office Complex” and “Lambada Core”. Perhaps they are important.
Lambada Core.
Pffffffffff
I used Google Translate and “Neaoplitanam” is what Google said “Pizza” translates to.
It should be known that the clocks throughout the game have been very interesting to me and i don’t know why.
Also, assuming that Black Mesa and Half Life 1 follow the same backstory and such, let’s also search this timeline of the Half Life shared universe since Storm told us to look at the story. Maybe we just need to look outside the ARG’s story into the “bigger picture” of things for this story and how what we see related to the events of Black Mesa both during and prior to the Resonance Cascade may tie into this conspiracy theory of an ARG story.
Also, when it comes to 21 goes into 1, I think the 21 stands for EP-0021, but we need to find out what is the 1 thing it goes into. We know that EP-0021 doesn’t head into the Anti-Mass Spectrometer, as GG-3883 does, so what could EP-0021 go into? Maybe Horn is using EP-0021 as a crystaline entity type thing like JeffMOD theorizes.
Actually, we should just get MatPat from Game Theory to do up his own theory on this. He’s normally good at figuring these crazy type of things out.
I believe the were actually part of an earlier clue. It’s possible they’re supposed to be used again for the hex code, but I doubt it.
Well yes, but Halos was “activated” during the Resonance Cascade, and EP-0021 was said to be switched out on the 11th(5 days before the incident), giving it plenty of time to be transfered from AM labs to QE labs. There is also talks between people at AM and QE, as indicated by the whiteboards in-game, so maybe that could explain why they’re in contact with eachother.
Maybe that big Lepton cannon in QE labs is being used as a modified Anti-Mass Spectrometer with EP-0021 to open a “portal” to someone else?