Many République fans have asked about the mysterious event referred to in the game as “The Arrival.” The game hints at The Arrival’s purpose without direct exposition, but we also elaborated upon it in “Kill Your Internet,” the République ARG.
ARG players discovered four documents that brought the Overseer’s thinking to light: two briefs to the Department of Defense proposing a large surveillance system under his control and two letters showing his cunning abuse of language to manipulate others. His proposal made the construction of Metamorphosis possible, leading to Hope’s escape and search for the truth. Although The Arrival itself differs from the proposals included in “Kill Your Internet,” the Overseer’s PYRAMID program set the tone and direction for the The Arrival.
In 1995, the Overseer (also known as “Cir”) offered the United States government a partnership with his corporation, Haplo Industries. He sought funding for a mass surveillance facility in order to control the future of America’s cultural and economic growth. Here is the text of that failed proposal.
Two internal emails from Haplo’s servers followed. The first email contained Cir’s scathing response to the PYRAMID brief’s rejection, as he instructs his subordinates how to profile people with legally-obtained metadata. The second email revealed his opportunistic joy at the tragic 9/11 terrorist attack, along with his instructions to resurrect the PYRAMID proposal six years after its rejection.
You can read the first email here — and read the second email here.
We concluded the trilogy with the revised PYRAMID proposal. It illustrated every abuse of rhetoric denounced by Socrates with a modern surveillance twist. The first PYRAMID proposal condescended to its reader, but the second used metadata about the target audience in order to manipulate the reader’s emotions, provoking an irrational acceptance of its content.
