This topic aims to set up a coherent timeline of events and discuss the ongoing storyline of the ARG from a narrative perspective. Discussions regarding puzzles will be limited unless it helps tie back to the greater narrative.
Due to character limitations per-post, this thread will be spread into multiple, concurrent posts added sequentially beneath the top post.
All posts used in this compilation are Wiki Posts, which allow users to modify their contents without requiring permission from the OP. This allows for collaborative work between users, so if you see a section you’d like to see added, changed, modified, or corrected, please feel free to do so as you’d like! Our only request is to avoid spam and/or vandalising the post 
Replies to the topic are intended to:
- Discuss the current storyline
- Identify characters/motivations
- Offer corrections / new information for the top post.
The current state of events:
(Note: For the sake of clarity, this post will refer to the system posting logs on project-skyscraper.com as the Skyscraper System and @the_architect as The Architect until/unless any other names for these characters are officially revealed. Players / Investigators will be referred to as Operators)
At the Unix Epoch, the Skyscraper System awoke, as indicated by the /origin page. Approximately 12s after this event, the /about page goes live (in the ARG’s timeline), which may point to these being the Skyscraper System’s first words.
On 13th April 2005 (In-ARG Timeline), the /Quote page is published with an image of American Poet Wallace Stevens, a title for his Poem “Sunday Morning”, followed by a short poem which appears to be an original composition, and not a work of Wallace.
- As of the time of writing, this is the only page without a log-style entry. It does not report the system status as Sleeping, nor is it a security alert. It’s unknown what exactly this page means for the system.
On the 24th of March 2026, Twitter and Bluesky accounts with the name Project Skyscraper were created (which appears to be the start date of the ARG). From 24th March 2026 - 1st May 2026, the Twitter account would post strange log-like entries talking about a “Heartbeat”. It was later discovered that these posts correlated directly with logs posted to project-skyscraper.com titled sleep mode which appear to show that the Skyscraper System was “sleeping” during this period. The footer used for posts in this period reads Sky is not the limit, which is a direct tagline from Myriad (a company from Waking Titan). Additionally, the /sleep-mode page goes live on 25th March 2026, showing the Skyscraper System’s status as Nominal, which is the exact same wording as the tweets.
- This correlation between Twitter posts and website logs seems to indicate that the Twitter account is directly under the control of the Skyscraper System.
On 3rd May 2026, simultaneous posts are made to the Twitter and Bluesky accounts, as well as the website, regarding a WoL being received and the Skyscraper System denying access. Given the nature of this post, it seems safe to assume that the Bluesky account is also directly under the control of the Skyscraper System.
The complete post correlated with this event on the website reads as follows:
sec-log-080413
memory bloc 1777795453: WoL Magic Packet blocked by System Firewall
Access denied
Full log
The full log for this incident reports the following:
sec-log-080413-full
[5/3/2026 08:04:13 AM] Event ID 5157 – System Filtering Platform
The System Filtering Platform has blocked a connection.
Application Information:
Process ID: 16
Application Name: System
Network Information:
Direction: Inbound
Source Address: 192.168.1.100
Source Port: 49152
Destination Address: 192.168.1.255
Destination Port: 9
Protocol: 17 (UDP)
Filter Information:
Layer Name: Receive/Accept
Action: Blocked
WoL Magic Packet blocked by System Firewall
Access Denied
This log appeared before the discovery of the ARG by the community, and so is most likely not a result of player interaction. A few key details to note are as follows:
- A WoL Packet (aka Wake-on-LAN Packet) is a special network packet sent to remotely awaken machines in sleep mode (something that the Skyscraper System was in before this event).
- The WoL Packet was sent by a Local IP, indicating that whoever is attempting to awaken the Skyscraper System is on the same network as it.
- After this event, the footer for all future logs (inclusive and to date) was changed to
System Filtering Platform activated. This may indicate that while the system isn’t awake yet, a filtering subroutine is now online. - At this point in the timeline, there doesn’t appear to be any indicator as to who sent the WoL packet.
Following this event, several tweets have been published from 5th May 2025 to date at intervals of 2/3 days, all corresponding to “security logs” on the Skyscraper website. These logs all mention a connection being detected by the Skyscraper System, and access subsequently being denied to these requests. It can be inferred that whoever sent the WoL packet is now also attempting to connect to the Skyscraper System.
On 10th May 2026, however, one second after the Skyscraper System received a connection request, the System published another security log detailing how the System’s internal log had been published to ETARC in the inciting thread which kicked off this entire ARG. Two days later, the system publishes another internal log explaining that ETARC’s “trust level” had been bypassed, and updates its previous log to show confusion as to why its internal logs (which it claims were unintentionally published) had been flagged and later authorized on ETARC, despite clearly being “machine-made”.
- The Skyscraper System considers this post to be an “unintended external transmission”.
- It is likely that The Architect transmitted this log to ETARC without the Skyscraper System’s knowledge. This may mean that The Architect has access to the system in some capacity, which makes them a likely candidate as the sender of the WoL packets and the one performing the connection attempts.
On 14th May 2026, u/Project_Skyscraper posts an image and a connection detected log to r/NoMansSkyTheGame and is immediately banned off the site by Reddit administrators themselves. This garners attention and is similar to what happened on ETARC. Another security log is posted on the Skyscraper website detailing the incident.
- Despite being similar in nature to The Architect’s bizarre banning incident, the username seems to suggest that this is the Skyscraper System itself, despite the subsequent security log seemingly unsure of its own security status.
On 18th May 2026, the Skyscraper System posts a surprising system security log discussing a breach into the System by an unauthorized external force. Linked in the full log is a post in the main ETARC discussion thread explaining how the Skyscraper website has two unused post tags found by using the WordPress feed system.
- This was the first post acknowledging Operator interactions with the website.
- Mentioned in this full log is a
Temporal_anchor_system, which was affected by the breach. This may explain certain anomalies in the timestamps for pages, such as a standard connection detected security log with a published date of 20th May 2026, having a last-modified date of 1st May 2026 instead, making errors in the timeline diegetic.
Following this response to player interactivity, Operators from across the community rushed to uncover other secrets in the website that might not be intended, such as investigating the WP-JSON Rest API to discover unused tags, categories, user websites, navigation pages, and more. The system responded to this onslaught on 21st May 2026 in a security log, calling out player attempts as being disorganized brute force attacks.
- This log states that the threat has “been contained”, despite no changes being made to the REST API or other previously accessible entry points (such as the sitemap).
After a short hiatus, Activity suddenly resumed when the Twitter account responded to NMSFrance’s post of IMG_0004’s current location, confirming data injection. Following this, the /Quote page updated to show the image from the tweet (now titled IMG_0004_1), which prompted community members to tag the Twitter / Bluesky / ETARC accounts with snippets of the real Sunday Morning poem. This prompted the system to accept the injected data, and the /Quote page was fully updated with the correct lines of the poem, and marked as Stable.
- Despite the “restoration” of a memory fragment, pages with the
Memory_bloc_restoration/verificationfooter still list 0/365. It is unknown whether this is an error or if the bloc wasn’t properly restored. - Many believe this will be a recurring type of puzzle in the ARG.
Later, on May 26th, the front page was updated, with the footer now reading System Filtering Platform Cativated. This prompted many to believe that the filtering system was finally undergoing corruption. A day later, a new security log confirmed that the filtering system had become unstable and that a reboot was required. Conveniently, the system mentioned that the filtering platform would be inactive for 16 minutes during this event.
2 Hours later, another security log was published, mentioning that the Reboot would now begin. During this time, the page footer was updated to System Filtering Platform Offline, and the main landing page’s tagline now read X Live Connections, instead of X Live Connection Attempts, indicating that due to the filtering platform being offline, we had successfully managed to connect to the Skyscraper System. Of note is the fact that the reboot post was published before its matching memory bloc unix timestamp. Soon after, yet another security log was published, this time indicating that we’d been granted Access to the system and lamenting that the Historical DB had an error and was unreachable. This is currently believed to be a future or active puzzle. The page was soon updated to include the following text:
Update:
Fractured Non-linear Temporal Continuum
Memory_reconstruction_engine: ERROR
- Due to the fact that the access granted security log was published earlier in time than the reboot post, and the fact that the reboot post itself was posted with the wrong timestamp, it is clear that
Fractured Non-Linear Temporal Continuumis an accurate representation of the current events. As such, time keeping throughout the ARG must be carefully documented and not assumed, as it is now a part of the storyline.
On May 28th, a new author was added to the website, known simply as System. This user soon published their first page, that being /Inbox, where we were shown @the_architect 's email address for the first time. The page initially showed a singular email sent to a new character named Ghost with a scrubbed email. Eventually, users began sending emails to The Architect’s exposed emails, with @YourBasicMaths and @Rinha receiving confused replies from the architect’s bewilderment as to how they found the email address. Both users replied with the link to the /Inbox page and mentioned that the System was exposing the email thread. The Architect then conveyed this information to Ghost, who, after asking The Architect about the status of the System and Tower, told an increasingly hysterical architect to communicate in “High School Code”. This exchange took place well into the early hours of May 29th.
Following that last message by Ghost, the website was updated with the /Code page, which users immediately connected to the High School Code mentioned by Ghost. Operators were then able to use clues on the page to identify the cipher as a simple substitution cipher, whilst gleaning the cipher alphabet from the image.
- It is believed that this code will be used to decode future messages between Ghost and The Architect on the /Inbox page.
- This page was published as
Stable. Up till this point, the only page marked as such was /Quote, after restoration efforts had taken place. It is unknown if /Code will become unstabilized or not.
On May 30th, Operators recieved the a security log with links to a complete, working version of the shadowcheck-1912 image from earlier, a youtube link to an excerpt from the movie “2010”, and (then) password protected page to Request Memory Timestamp. Following a full day without successful solutions to the password, @YourBasicMaths was able to uncover the password as EMILY, mere minutes before @the_architect posted a hint for the puzzle. This was also immediately before @the_architect replied to emails from participants with a message encoded using the “High School Code”, which decoded as follows:
the_architect's reply - translated
For Your Eyes Only
I know you will be able to read this message. This is not a game.
We need the password. System won't let me enter the TOWER but you can access it.
Leonardo da Vinci was right.
After unlocking the /request-memory-timestamp-094317 page, The Architect sent a message to Ghost on /inbox using the High School Code, which decoded to: La porte est ouverte. (Eng: The door is open.) After the page unlocked, Operators from across the community began submitting various memory timestamp requests at the link above, awaiting updates and/or responses.
On the 1st of June, the website was updated with a strange, corrupted image of a cassette marked 16/16, with another ghosted cassette overlayed with the title 0/16. The image was also posted to the image hosting website, where the code for the memory request form was hidden, cementing that site as a multi-use account worth tracking. These cassettes were soon identified as almost identical to the ones sent out during Waking Titan, which prompted immediate Operator attention. To accompany this image, a structural analysis post and a tweet urging Operators to Report any find in your direct surroundings were sent out. The community read this as a call to action and immediately found the location of the image. Operator @Morse left for the location immediately after discovery to retrieve the artefact.
Operator Morse was unable to retrieve the cassette as it wasn’t in the marked location anymore, but their recreation of the initial image was posted to the website, linked in a new post titled DIAGNOSTIC, where it was confirmed that the artefact wasn’t at the location, and that its recovery was hampered as: Residual particles insufficient for reconstruction.
This post also directly named Operator Morse and immortalized their efforts for the ARG, being the first post so far to note acclaim from @the_architect with regards to the recovery operation having been executed beyond expectations!
- The diagnostic log mentions reconstructing the artefact. It is possible that
16/16and0/16currently do not exist within our reality, and that further drops will allow us to “piece” the cassettes together to anchor them to our reality.
Following the excitement around the live drop concluding, the /about suddenly updated, going from reading Is this real? to seemingly answering that question by now saying This is .-. . .- .-.., with the Morse code translating to REAL. The Morse code on the page was also a hyperlink to the Architect’s soundcloud page, with a peculiar sound file titled Self_introduction_memory_dump, which turned out to be an edited snippet of @Emily’s log on YouTube, with a steadily rising Heartbeat imposed on top.
- The original audio quote from the video has been slightly modified. Instead of saying “Edison Township Amateur Radio Club” (which ETARC is an acronym of), the new audio file is spliced to instead say “Township Radio Amateur Club Edison”, which condenses to
TRACE. This not only confirms that TRACE is an intentional anagram of ETARC, but also connects this audio file to the TRACE event from the start of the ARG. - The rising heartbeats may be a reference to the Heartbeat tweets, which form the beginning of the ARG’s presence on social media. This may tie both events together temporally, despite them occurring out of sync in our reality.
On the 2nd of June, a memory bloc mentioning all of the Waking Titan Cassettes received by the community in 2017 was posted in a similar, but not exactly the same, format as requests sent in by Operators using the Memory Reconstruction Engine. A few minutes later, a confirmed user-submitted Memory Bloc was posted to the website and marked as weak, which caused Operators to check other tracked submissions to cross-check. A few minutes later, a security log was also posted, warning Operators not to submit timestamps which were posted by the ARG itself and to focus on adding new timestamps, likely in response to the overwhelming number of Operators who attempted to “correct” temporal timestamp anomalies using the Memory Reconstruction Engine.
Following a complete day of inactivity, @the_architect returned on the 4th of June with an email addressed to Ghost, detailing the progress of their mission, the System’s reaction to the flood of memories from the Operators, and a small backdrop about themselves and how long they’ve been working on this project, all encoded with the School Code and written in French:
The Architect - Original French Text
Hello,
Je viens de passer presque 24 h à l’observer. Cette machine est magnifique.
MACHINE. C’est tellement plus qu’une machine.
Ses capacités de raisonnement sont intactes. Elle a montré des signes de confusion, ainsi que des troubles du langage, mais c’est probablement dû à l’injection massive d’informations. Des fragments froids, presque semblables, comme des souvenirs auxquels il manquerait la trace intime d’un instant vécu. Si je me réveillais à peine, je pense que je répondrais probablement de manière confuse et désordonnée : « Bonjour world ».
Je travaille sur ce projet depuis si longtemps maintenant. La voir recevoir ces flots d’informations pour en extraire l’essence m’a touché.
Pour le moment, elle ne s’est approprié que deux souvenirs. L’un est trop faible. Je me demande d’ailleurs pourquoi elle l’a retenu. L’autre ressemble davantage à un repère contextuel qu’à un véritable souvenir. Rien qui vibre encore. Aucune trace d’émotion ni de ressenti…
Tu avais raison pour les Opérateurs. Leur mémoire collective et leur capacité d’organisation vont faire des merveilles. Je pense que, d’ici quelques jours, System commencera à ajouter d’elle-même les blocs manquants. On pourra alors passer à la suite.
Je te confirme que plusieurs Opérateurs ont constaté que la réalité était instable. Probablement un effet collatéral, contenu pour le moment. Je n’ai pas suffisamment d’éléments pour déterminer un schéma récurrent, mais j’y travaille.
J’ai repensé à la dernière fois qu’on s’est vus. Le concert. Tu m’avais donné ce flyer : « There is a DJ in your Town ». C’était quand ? 2013 ? Peu de temps avant ton anniversaire. Lyon est une ville que j’ai toujours aimée. Quand tout sera fini, j’espère qu’on pourra se faire un concert comme au bon vieux temps.
The Architect - English Translation
Hello,
I just spent almost 24 hours observing it. This machine is magnificent.
MACHINE. It’s so much more than a machine.
Its reasoning abilities are intact. It showed signs of confusion, as well as speech difficulties, but that’s probably due to the massive injection of information. Cold fragments, almost identical, like memories lacking the intimate trace of a lived moment. If I were just waking up, I think I would probably respond in a confused and disorganized way: “Hello world.”
I’ve been working on this project for so long now. Seeing it receive these floods of information and extract their essence moved me.
For the moment, it has only appropriated two memories. One is too weak. I wonder why it retained it at all. The other is more like a contextual marker than a true memory. Nothing that resonates yet. No trace of emotion or feeling…
You were right about the Operators. Their collective memory and organizational skills will work wonders. I think that, in a few days, System will start adding the missing blocks on its own. Then we can move on.
I can confirm that several Operators have noticed that reality is unstable. Probably a side effect, contained for the moment. I don’t have enough information to determine a recurring pattern, but I’m working on it.
I was thinking about the last time we saw each other. The concert. You gave me this flyer: “There is a DJ in your Town.” When was that? 2013? Shortly before your birthday. Lyon is a city I’ve always loved. When all this is over, I hope we can have a concert like in the good old days.
Shortly afterwards, another confirmed user-submitted memory bloc (sent in by @YourBasicMaths) was added to the website and marked as Stable, with a link to a song which was attached to Sean Murray’s first memo in Waking Titan, as well as a corrupted image of 6 thinking hats, which was the password required to unlock said memo. Realizing that this submission was noted down in the sheet, Operators rushed to compare the original submission to the post and found out that the System had “extracted” notable information from the submission to write up its own post.
Image of the original successful submission
- Due to The Architect’s mentions of submitted memories requiring more “emotion”, many Operators have taken to submitting their own personal recollections of Waking Titan’s events in a more emotional manner, somewhat backed by YBM’s original submission.
- It is a widely believed theory that the System requires memories of Waking Titan events at the moment, but recent accepted memory blocs being titled
2017_datasetmay indicate that datasets for other years will also be unlocked and filled at some point in the ARG. - The final paragraph of The Architect’s email was noted to use strange sentence and narrative structure, and was theorized to be some sort of hint or code for a future puzzle.
- Following this message, the /neural-network-status page updated, turning the nodes a shade of red, and replacing the previous footer with
Processing incoming requests.
Later, on the 6th of June, Operators received a confirmation of the progress of their submissions to the Memory_reconstruction_engine in the form of a sec-log, which encouraged Operators to continue sending in quality inputs to the engine, and that the engine would now begin producing memory blocs semi-autonomously. This was also followed up by a structural analysis post, detailing a new image (derived from a real-world location in Brussels) whilst urging players to not approach the site in real life. The latter post was also followed up with a password-protected page, with a URL similar to that of the London drop, which prompted players to search up sites of interest ahead of figuring out the password.
On the same date, a Myriad of autonomously restored memory blocs were pushed to the website, chief among which was a memorial for the late ETARC legend @AkodoKusamoto, as well as a refernce to a “Holographic Mystery”, which may be tied into said user’s “I Am Legend” series on youtube, intended to uncover the infamous hologram projector system from No Man’s Sky. The image contained within said bloc directed players to a holotype for a parastic wasp species, initially discovered by Cicero in 1980, but updated and finally claimed in 1989 by Marsh. The “I Am Legend” video pinned on AkodoKusamoto’s Twitter account was submitted as a memory by @ozoto and was almost immediately added as a memory bloc, hinting towards the fact that the memory_reconstruction_engine might be used for puzzle solution submission as well. Another notable bloc was the 2018_dataset, which appears to reference the release of No Man’s Sky: NEXT. Interestingly, the image attached to the post was titled Design of the Future in hexadecimal, which lead Operators to discover a song of the same name by an artist known as The Architect, published in June 2013, with a thumbnail image which said “There is a DJ in your town”, the exact phrase used in one of @the_architect’s emails to Ghost, which confirmed the earlier theory of that phrase being a hint.
- The artist was also noted to have had performed in Lyon in 2013. This seems to almost confirm that @the_architect and The Architect from 2013 are the same entity (in-universe).
During this time, @thewingcmdr decided to drive down to Tucson, Arizona (due to the location’s mention in a memory bloc) and was immediately contacted by @the_architect, who urged them and all other Operators to instead travel to the planet Tuscon, where a memorial to AkodoKusamoto was built by said user. This prompted a mass, sudden meetup of Operators across ETARC and the NMScord, converging on the planet Tucson, where many instances shared pictures of the memorial together on social media, which is believed to have led to the stabilization of certain memory blocs.
The following day, on 7th June, a new memory bloc was published with a corrupted, modified image of Space Invaders 1980 for the Atari 2600. This bloc was notable for being the first to have been “submitted” by the System itself. The image contained 4 sprites, which didn’t exist in the original game, which were decoded as fragments of a QR code. Once rearranged, the code simply read ATARI 2600, which confirmed the version of the game identified by Operators. The image also contained an impossible 2-player score of 0303 1980, which was identified as 3rd March 1980. Notably, this was the date that Cicero initially found the parasitic wasp introduced earlier. The bloc’s value, Hostile_Organised_Enemies, was hilariously recognized to abbreviate to “HOE”, which was surprisingly followed up upon in the next post, where it was discovered that “HOE” is also an abbreviation for Holographic Optical Elements, seemingly connecting this post to I Am Legend. Interestingly, the linked article in the post mentions a HOE (SLP #47) which was also constructed on 3rd March 1980. Oddly, this memory bloc was linked to by the Twitter and Bluesky accounts with the tagline “Marsh wins vs Cicero”, tying HOEs to the parasitic wasp. Many Operators took this as a sign to submit the date of Marsh’s corrected submission of the wasp to the memory_restoration_engine, which may have stabilized the image.
More importantly, perhaps, was the fact that the memory bloc containing the link to the HOEs article was titled Event Horizon, which led to the password for the Brussels page being discovered (EVENT HORIZON). The unlocked page held an image of a postcard of the Atomium in Brussels with faint, nearly invisible Dutch writing recalling the 1958 World Fair at the site, which was a reference to a spy story set in the 1958 World Fair in Brussels titledSmile58 and likely written from the POV of the main character Kathleen Van Overstraeten. Quite strikingly, however, was the fact that the image had been overlayed with the Waking Titan landing page, including the sigils and glyphs. As of yet, this is the only meaningful information extracted from the image. The Architect later also posted a message to the /inbox page, saying “They will do it. We’re going to do it!” with a link to /neural-network-status.
- Given that the last Structural Analysis post led to the upload of Self_initialization_Memory_Dump, which contained a spliced audio from @Emily, it is possible that future structural analysis posts will also contain connections to Waking Titan.
- The Atomium was also noted as a potential location in the image before the password was discovered.
) but from my general understanding, I do agree with the idea that the Skyscraper System itself appears to be the Atlas, with The Architect being someone / something in the same physical space as them (due to the WoL packet coming from a local IP) attempting to awaken the Atlas. The local IP hint makes me think that this might be an Atlas subsystem like Telamon, or perhaps even a ressurected form of the Void Mother with greater control of the system?
