Waking Titan

Waking Titan
Active since 2017-05-28
A website with 16 radio stations, which may be leading to something more.
Type	[[List_of_Investigations#Official|Official]]
Creator	Alice & Smith
Discovered	2017-05-28

Main Page > List of Investigations > Waking Titan

Waking Titan (also known as Project WT) is an ARG involving a multitude of websites, phone numbers, and radio stations scattered across the world. Apparently, the ARG is being produced by veteran puppet masters, and will feature NPCs, actors, and live events. However, the ultimate purpose of Waking Titan remains a mystery.

Initial Announcement

On May 27th, 2017, Twitter user @argn tweeted a link to 'project-wt.com'. The link lead to a website which contained a map showing sixty locations, four of which were active at the time. The locations, when clicked on, revealed the location's name and it's status. The active locations also revealed a link to a livestream of a local radio stations originating in the corresponding location. The website also displayed a date, June 8th, and stated that the first clue was being initialized. A list of active locations and their corresponding radio stations can be found here.

Another website was found by searching for 'wakingtitan.com', based on the title of the 404 page on the original site. The website prompted visitors for a username and password.

In addition, a link to the original website was sent to a Unfiction moderator, and was described as:

It's the countdown to a new, large-scale ARG launching this summer, starting with 16 radio stations across the world. It's being produced by veteran puppet masters and includes NPCs, actors, live events and much more... 

bW9zY293 Station

On June 2nd, 2017 the location icon for Moscow came online with the location name and link apparently corrupted. Rather than the location name of 'Moscow' and a link to a local radio station, it initialized with the location name 'bW9zY293' and a link to a pastebin. The pastebin was short, only three lines:

[email protected]
X (XXX) XXX-XXXX
You have until Jun. 3rd - 18:00 UTC

Emails & Phone Calls

All players who sent a valid phone number to [email protected] received an email in response:

< Database Updated >
[Email] -> X (XXX) XXX-XXXX
 
To change entry please reply to this message with a new contact.
.. Message ID: 6f71407e-7106-452d-8dd1-017f3eb00e1b
.. Low bandwith[sic] relay - bridge.myriad-oc1920.sat
.. Connection active
.. Rendering for message payload

From 2017-06-03 18:00-18:45 UTC all players with verified phone numbers were called with a voice clip containing the following message:

This is Waking Titan.
He arose, and on the stars, lifted his curved lids, and kept them wide.

The second line is an excerpt of the poem Hyperion by John Keats:

Hyperion arose, and on the stars 
Lifted his curved lids, and kept them wide 

This gave players the word Hyperion, which was subsequently used as a password for wakingtitan.com. One player received a phone call different from all the rest - it simply stated:

This is Waking Titan.
Username: wakingtitan

wakingtitan.com

Navigating to wakingtitan.com prompted visitors for a username and password. The web page could be accessed by logging in with these credentials: Username: wakingtitan Password: hyperion

Logging in displayed the site's homepage, which featured a hexagonal arrangement of triangles, one of which was glowing red. Clicking on the glowing red triangle prompted visitors to enter an email address to be notified of further updates. When the page was first accessed, there was a row of 5 glyphs along the bottom, but only the first glyph was active. Clicking on the first glyph brought visitors to another page:

Clicking on the globe icon linked visitors to a PDF file, which was a top secret memo from Major Sophie Dubois to Elizabeth Leighton.

Top Secret Memo

The first page of the memo

The file contained vague “Assessments” of the project’s assets, infrastructure, and participant skill. A “Current Footprint” section included various social media websites and ARG sites (including this very wiki), indicating that ARG players themselves were the participants of Project WT. Another entry in the footprint section, forums.etarc.org, was ostensibly a forum for radio enthusiasts. It was speculated that the ETARC forums would turn out to be a hub for interacting with NPCs, which was confirmed when wakingtitan.com updated to include a direct link to the ETARC forums (on the glyph in the center of the hexagon).

On the footer of each page of the PDF file, the string =O3QcsBFH6zY was displayed. This string lead to a YouTube URL, which hosted a song by Kavinsky called First Blood.

The final page of the PDF file contained 5 alphanumeric sequences, each of which has a missing entry. Each break corresponded to one letter of the final solution, which was ORION.

Entering ORION on the page where the PDF was initially found displayed “Granted” and accepts the password, then returned visitors to the homepage. The first glyph along the bottom of the screen then turned red.

First Sequence (Atlas)

The URL discovered in the spectrogram

On the 8th of June, a broadcast was played on the radio stations displayed on project-wt.com at different times during the day. The voice in the transmission said

We are the mystery hiding in plain sight. You will find us. This broadcast is the first clue.

Spectrograms of the clip show text reading wakingtitan.com.

At approximately 1550-1600 UTC, an email was sent out to the Waking Titan email list, and at about 1700 UTC, a second glyph was unlocked on wakingtitan.com. Additionally, clicking the top left triangle in the center hexagon now revealed a puzzle instead of a prompt to enter a dialogue box:

The first puzzle, with an answer of '16'

The first puzzle can be solved several ways, but the most apparent one was as follows:

If players look at the image in the background, they can see some text.
The characters are CCXL and XV, one on top of the other with a dividing line between them.
That's 240 and 15 in Roman Numerals.
240/15 = 16, the answer to the puzzle.

The number 16 also appears in several other places: for instance, on a picture of a dossier hosted on the Waking Titan site. 16 was also the number of radio stations that were activated. Solving the puzzle causes a video to play. Several Discord users have attempted to transcribe the audio of the video:

My name is (?). You must help her find the way.  If you're receiving this signal, please, help us. You must save us. Without the videocom to help us, we're pretty much stuck. They can't find our devices. Help us. Tell her about Saladin (?)

After this puzzle is solved, clicking the second (top right) triangle shows a date, time, and radio station as well as an input box for email updates:

By clicking the second glyph on the bottom row, a second PDF file can be accessed, as well as a text entry box. The PDF file hinted towards a live drop that took place at 7:00PM that day, at Cafe Bene in New York City.

Live Drop

The piece of paper received at at the cafe

At 7PM local time at Cafe Bene in NYC, discord user nikel met with the courier and was given a piece of paper.

Transcription of the string:

MDEzRDowMDc4OjA3MjQ6MDA1Ng==

Converted from base64 to ASCII:

013D:0078:0724:0056

No Man's Sky dead drop

The base64 was No Man's Sky coordinates which lead to a Communications Station that displayed the text:

LOOP16 UNEXPECTED ERROR: 97C-303N-5884-P

Entering 97C-303N-5884-P into the second glyph returned the "accepted" screen, confirming the link between Waking Titan and No Man's Sky. At this point, it should be noted that No Man's Sky had a concurrent ARG involving 16 cassette tapes. The prominence of the number 16, as well as the method of hiding spectrograms in audio, make it highly likely that the No Man's Sky ARG is intertwined with Waking Titan.

Second Sequence

At about 5:20 AM UTC an advertisement was played on SBC Paradise FM which referenced a service called Echo Software, and a website.

Transcription:

I lost my grandmother, Emma, 2 years ago. She was 85. I miss her so much. But now, thanks to Echo Software, I - I can hear her voice back, just using a sample from an old home movie. *Grandma Speaks* Are you filming this honey? *Back to woman* I can make her say what makes me feel close to her again, like *Grandma Interrupts* I love you honey, and I'm leaving you all my jewelery. *Normal woman laughs? Cries? Both? idk* Thanks to Echo Software everybody's voice can be anybodies. Visit echo-64.com

At first, http://echo-64.com had the text, BEGIN SECOND SEQUENCE ... Initialization may take up to 24 hours.. At 17:12 UTC on 10th June, the site was updated into a fully-fledged corporate website. From reading the site, we learned that Echo is a company that allows its customers to synthesize virtual versions of deceased relatives. The purpose of this process was ostensibly to help people recover emotionally from the loss of a loved one. The process begins with sending Echo a 5-minute audio snippet from the person in question.

A phone number was listed on the site - +1 (408) 703-2077. Upon calling it, players would hear a message, transcribed here:

Echo is in transition and therefore cannot accept new input. When we achieve our predetermined finite state, we'll take new input and get back to you. Thank you. [BEEP] [Exactly 5 seconds of near-silence] [BEEP]

If players spoke during the silent section of the call, the final beep would not occur until the player stopped talking, or until 5 minutes had elapsed.

Clicking the string of numbers at the bottom of the Echo page, 84.190.188, redirected to Franka Potente - Believe, the third song found in this ARG.

Second Triangle

The clue which leads to the password "prism"

Located on the homepage of the site was a row of 5 geometric shapes. Clicking on all of them yielded the phrase:

The order of things is formed by the angle of its measure.

Clicking again on the shapes, this time in the order of decreasing angle (circle, triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon) yielded the riddle

This breaks white into 7.

The solution to the riddle was prism, which was the password for the second triangle on the main Waking Titan website.

Completing this triangle resulted in a new video being played, featuring the same woman as the first video. In this one she introduced herself as Elizabeth Leighton, CEO of the Atlas Foundation.

Hex to Gif

The image whose hexadecimal data was embedded in the site

Searching for anything on the Echo website revealed a set of 5 numbers:

112 97 115 116 101

Decoded from decimal:

paste

There was also a much larger block of hex underneath. Decoding this hex yielded the raw data for a .gif file. Opening this file, players could just barely make out a string of characters:

z1Rgxi5L

These two ciphers led to the URL http://pastebin.com/z1Rgxi5L, which contained the phrase There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so in hexadecimal. This phrase is a quote from Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2.