Paradox Recountings

Wingeding’s overview of Paradox Apotheosis:

Right. So, in about December of 2011, someone by the name of Malcolm came to /x/ with a mystery. Something about a crazy girl planning to commit suicide... or something like that. It’s been a year. The seeds of the team started on this thread, although not everyone was picked up from there. We dug around, found that there were more hidden pages, as alluded to by the post that was currently up (1 day remains until apotheosis.First and foremost, it’s...). Stuff like the the Yoshinoya noodle rant (with the end of the URL being /jp/), or how she wouldn’t have made the code so easy to guess (/aristotle/).
Well, as fate would have it, we were being watched. Someone (maybe jokingly) posted that he called the cops. We can only assume this was the cause of the rapid deletion of most of PA. We scrambled to salvage what we could. Then, to put a hold on the anon trolls, those who would wanted to join in were asked to post their emails. They received an invitation to a Rizon IRC channel from a fellow by the name of Tokan. Even then, something was up, since there was some contention on who should have been invited. Well... time went on, and we kept searching for answers. Who was this girl? What did she know?

As you can probably understand, our focus was less on her puzzle presented in her then-final post... more on May herself.. This was furthered by two events:
-According to one of our members, who had been around longer than we had, she had posted the co-ordinates of the WTC memorial.
-Some of our members were making this public, pursuing her, and eventually the group was presented with a screencap of her asking us to stop, that she’d never come to /jp/ again.

There was also a screencapped message containing her email. Now, Umbra was one of the first to notice that the email /wasn’t/ the same font as the rest of the message, and although he pointed it out, he was waved off. This reached a fever pitch when a user attempted to directly contact her Christmas Night. While that was happening, Mal was sent out to meet her. As we later found out, though... he never even left the house, having been stopped by family.

Once Christmas Morning arrived, these events, combined with the fact that someone had sent her an email, were taken by Tokan as grounds to trim the fat of the group. Anyone he knew to be unaffiliated with /jp/ needed to be cut, since they “wouldn’t understand her.” (Paraphrasing of lost quote.) Sadly, I had to wrestle that out of him. His first explanation was that it was over, which I knew to be a lie, since she had posted that message (失敗した 失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した失敗した 私は失敗した..., translation: “I Failed”, repeated) soon after her jump attempt? She had specifically said in there that she was going to jump on New Years Eve.

Well, at first, I left, tail between my legs. But later that day, I came back and tried to gather up some of the lost and rejected, and form my own team... Normally a great idea. Not so much when none of the people actually physically had the logs, or knew just what was a steins;gate reference and what wasn’t. It was made abundantly clear that Tokan hadn’t been asking us to selflessly drop the investigation: in severing us from anyone savvy to what was going on, he had sabotaged us.

We confronted the splinter group, having found them through whois-ing, and dragged them back into our old channel... to no avail. They wouldn’t tell us anything new. Thus it ended... or so we thought.
______

Umbra here to outline the later events.
Back in December I managed to get very friendly with one of the two other users in the “3 person elite investigative team” I had somehow become a part of. This individual, henceforth named “/jp/girl” and I spent a great deal of time discussing the investigation, and as time went by this person let on that the other individual besides ourselves (Tokan) was indeed the person who made ParadoxApotheosis. She claimed “May” had given her compelling evidence and that they were who they said they were, that “May” was actually male, and that the blog was nothing more than a /jp/ blog that had taken a fantastical turn as a result of May’s imagination. I wanted proof of these claims, and Tokan had mysteriously disappeared. It was, at that point, just the two of us. She was entirely resistant to sharing any of that evidence with me. I became suspicious of both of them, as a result, and realized that I had either stumbled into some sort of infighting among them, or they had successfully derailed every attempt to impregnate the mystery of PA. When PA went down, I managed to keep in touch with /jp/girl. A period of restless nothing ensued, and then eventually SolitonStream came to life sometime in May of 2012, only after PA was revived - at the time, however and ever since then (until recently) was locked with a password. Throughout all of this, /jp/girl I became what can only be described as reluctant friends, the reluctance being entirely on her part. To this day she has not shared her identity willingly, despite knowing our real names and even having pictures of some of us. She displayed an affinity for social manipulation, and she is known to be otherwise highly intelligent, making her a prime candidate for the actual person behind PA. She displays some oddities, such as shifts in her speaking style and attitude; this could be attributed to mental illness, or perhaps /jp/girl is, in fact, not an individual but multiple people working on this “project,” sharing an account. I return to this subject later on.

When we found SolitonStream, we also heard rumors of a new investigative team on IRC.
The second investigative team consisted of 5-6 people initially. Gradually the group shrank down in a similar fashion as did the first group, though admittedly it wasn’t forcibly severed from the rest as Tokan enforced. Several users joined up, only to leave after a time inexplicably. Being extremely distrustful of any outsiders, there were only three mainstead users who stuck around for the entire time. We came onto the scene after these three “core” members had already verified each other to be trustworthy, and thus we were only able to secure snippets of their evidence. Supposedly they had newspaper clippings of a “red necktie” that had been found at the WTC memorial, they had contact information for one of the American professors May was attempting to contact for help with her plans, etc. These users went by the handles Finis, gaiVolk, and gades. An important point to note was that through the use of gikopoi, gades had supposedly gotten a chance to see and/or communicate with “May.” gaiVolk was for some reason given the name “Steppenwolf,” which you will find mentioned in SolitonStream. From what was gathered on SolitonStream, in her first post May asserted that she had somehow succeeded in her attempt to transverse through reality. This directly contradicted the last post of ParadoxApotheosis (as anyone reading this must be aware), which stated that she “failed” that night. More data was generated, dispersed, and analyzed; Finis and gaiVolk prepared to leave for Japan to investigate the rocket launch that was supposedly scheduled to occur. They promised to be back by early August, and gave gades information in order to contact them in case he needed to. Needless to say, Finis and gaiVolk never returned. A bit later than that, Soliton Stream recieved a new, lengthy post, wherein the identities of each of the investigators (their online names) were displayed in a series of images. 4 files were appended to this, each one corresponding with a different season. All attempts to open them properly failed. They are included: they most likely contain valuable information, but according to May, they cannot be cracked with conventional computational devices and will be encrypted until several decades from now, “when computers catch up with the algorithm used to encrypt them.” Gades joined up with us, and we found him to be trustworthy and generally unlike the other two. He was deeply distrustful of /jp/girl, which was understandable, considering her involvement, her supposed communications, and the information she possessed. Nothing could be truly done about it, and we joined forces for a time in an attempt to figure things out. We found a possible alternate tumblr blog, marshmallowjustice, that was swiftly taken down around the same time SolitonStream became publicly known. Finis then returned late in 2012. She sent two audio logs of supposed “witnesses” to whatever international terrorism/crimes May had been orchestrating. These audio files sound fabricated and fake, clearly an attempt to cause more trouble for the remaining investigators. Henry posted the contents of one of the topbar links that had been stealthily updated just before the site went down for good: http://thedissociativediagnostic.tumblr.com/post/36996976851/indictment-by-international-investigations-trial
Finis seemed to be “in control” of gaiVolk, and wouldn’t allow him to communicate freely with any of us. Finis and gaiVolk were thenceforth suspicious individuals who may be affiliated with May or /jp/girl.

This entire investigation has been marked with concealment of truth, outright lies, and widespread falsehoods. /jp/girl and an anon that posted to Henry’s tumblr both suggested that PA was written by a team of individuals, not just one person. Finis and gaiVolk mentioned Cicada to gades, who then communicated that to us later. Both of these hints were what led us to Cicada in the first place. Gades sent us a chatlog between himself and Finis. Here is an excerpt:

<gades> ok
<gades> well
<gades> what about the cicada thing
<Finis> What about it?
<gades> if its true, how does the password from PA lead to it
<Finis> The Tor links posted on both are one and the same. In fact, some of those Tor links were posted on SS while we were gone. And besides that, it should be obvious. The pictures on PA, 3301, and SS all use steganography as well as allusions to poetry and literature.

According to /jp/girl, there is a great deal of information to be gained from the lack of information. She mentioned intelligence analysis, and collecting data despite there being a supposed lack of information to work with. There have been constant rumors of information floating around on Usenet, which is sort of in fitting with the supposed information located in the deepweb. Paradoxapotheosis also used to be a youtube account back when PA still existed: there was a video of someone playing a bunch of songs from popular games and animes, clearly meant to be May, but their head was of course not visible. Later, the second investigative team, namely gades (who is fluent in Japanese) confirmed through gikopoi that the video was actually made by someone from gikopoi who was playing requests for folks who asked. They liked a single video with their account: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBd25rVZyXE
There may still be remnants of this on Google, though their youtube has been gone for a long time. In one of the unlinked pages of PA they posted this video and the lyrics to it: http://youtu.be/d9NhHZdUe1s

Soliton Stream logs:
http://www.mediafire.com/?4ffway5h4ay3snj


Pictures that were posted to SolitonStream in one of the last lengthy posts: Used to "call out" and identify those who were investigating (their online identities):
http://www.mediafire.com/?sk78edqs9xy9kua
http://www.mediafire.com/?1i8l9dzlh2qzvr3 (This is the page plus a little more as it appeared on the site)
When I was speaking with her on the subject, /jp/girl commented at one point, paraphrased: "Oh Alex, how silly you look in that dress and wig." She has since referred to "May" as Alex, the supposed young man behind PA. Alex may be his "actual" name, considering /jp/girl claimed to have seen his passport, ID, and other sensitive information. Talked to him extensively, "played chess with him for a week, drank tea."

Audio Recordings (from Finis, given to us by gades):
http://www.mediafire.com/?bgdaz7tau73ecaq

The Four Seasons files (from Soliton Stream)
http://www.mediafire.com/?9il4r9o4801k7d0

Content of ParadoxApotheosis (unlinked pages were unable to be saved, sadly):
http://www.google.com/reader/view/#stream/feed/http%3A//paradoxapotheosis.tumblr.com/rss

Download an RSS reader like RSSOwl and make an Archive of this as soon as possible. These posts no longer exist and thus when Google Reader goes down, so does all of the info contained within.

------------UPDATE 1-------------

So we remembered towards the end of the PA debacle and in the time that ensued afterwards, /jp/girl revealed to us that in her conversations with Alex, the truth had come out. Alex had wanted to win over the heart of those reading his messages, to be hooked into his story and fall in love with him. Then he would "break their heart," and anger them to the extent that they would come trying to kill him. That was a small plausible conclusion /jp/girl had come to, though it didn't seem in fitting with some of the other things that happened. Just figured it was worth mentioning.

------------UPDATE 2-------------

Video uploaded to Paradoxapotheosis' account, the only one before it was disabled: http://www.mediafire.com/?icsvl1aubbudkyj