Transmission.txt

"With a defiant crescendo, god jammed his .38 into his jaw and opened a skylight in his head. He crumpled lifelessly to the ground, leaving the rest of us behind to persist in the doomed world he supposedly had created."

—Jadus, transmission.txt

transmission.txt

Video title	transmission.wmv (original) transmission.txt (after April 4, 2020)
Creator	Jadus
Channel	Jadusable
Upload date	March 23, 2020
Runtime	6:16
Tags	N/A
Game	N/A

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iseeyou

transmission.txt is the fifth video of the Hubris Arc and the thirtieth canon video in the ARG. It is preceded by end.wmv and followed by iseeyou.

Synopsis

On March 23, 2020 at 5:30pm, \ was set to premiere in an hour when it was removed from the channel. Soon afterward, it was replaced by transmission.wmv, which did premiere at 6:30. It continued Jadus' story from before, in which he enters a dilapidated house and encounters a man who believes he's responsible for the collapse of society. Afterward, the link to \ was found in the video's spectrogram.

Video

Description

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Transcript

The light from the previous three videos appears alongside audio interference. The screen cuts briefly to an image of an unknown figure, then back. We see the living room from the last few videos again.

Jadus types:

• We went door to door, looking for anything left in the dilapidated house to take before meeting with our contact. It was clear the house had been cleared out once before, and then whatever remained had been looted again. As expected, we saw one man waiting for us in the last room of the house. It was hardly a palace - the room was littered with a crumpled sleeping bag, empty cans, and a few magazines. It was clear that he had been here a while. In a world where everyone was constantly fighting for their life, he looked exceptionally haggard.
• "Are you Berkeley?" I inquired.
• "My name," he said exasperatedly, "is not Berkeley."
• "You match his description."
• "My name...is Tyler. It's Tyler."
• "What?"
• "I'm done pretending," he turned to face us, "My name is Tyler Lawman. I grew up here."
• With all the data we left behind in the old world, using your own name quickly became a liability. Names were traceable. You could take a name and find an address, a bank statement, a family member...anything. You could take a name and find a vulnerability. Doxxing took on a whole new, violent meaning. The digital footprint we left behind was our Achilles heel. It only made sense to shed it completely. So it became an unspoken rule that you take on a new name.
• My partner Denton got it right - I kind of had an idea of where it might have come from but it was under the radar enough that it didn't draw attention. In the beginning you inevitably had morons dipping into the pop culture lexicon, wanting to name themselves after obnoxiously famous fictional characters. They either wisened up, got killed, or starved to death. The best names were short, unique enough, and didn't draw attention.
• Tyler had just used his real name, and he didn't even know us. That was bad. That meant he didn't care if we knew.
• We're here to come get you. We've got a good group of poeple that want you to join up with them," Denton reasoned.
• Tyler ignored Denton and looked straight at me.
• "Hey man," he said with a faint smile, "What's yours? Come on."
• "Jadus," I refused.
• The look on his face deflated, he still had a faint smile left on his lips but nothing was propping it up anymore. It looked like he was ready to say what he really wanted to say.
• "Oh...Ok Jadus. I'm sorry about all of this."
• "What do you mean?"
• I expected the worst.
• "All," he gestured broadly, his shirt lifting up just enough to see the outline of a pistol tucked in his waist, "All of this."
• "How so?" Denton inquired. He slowly began to raise his hand out towards Tyler as if to caution him. I had seen this trick many times - one hand for misdirection, the other slowly sliding into place to draw on him.
• But Tyler didn't look ready to do anything, he just stared at the ground.
• "I think I made this happen."
• "I think this was all my fault."
• He looked like he was repeating the words in disbelief.
• "I'm going to wake up soon. I'm done. This has gotten too fucked up."
• He turned and looked at us, remembering that he had an audience.
• "You guys aren't even real, are you?"
• the question set us both back.
• "I feel pretty real, Tyler," Denton barked.
• "No, no, no you're not. You're not real. I mean, actually real. Like me."
• He saw our confusion. He exhaled loudly and redoubled his efforts to explain to us like we were children.
• "I had a life before this. A mom and a dad. Had a childhood. Even had a girl I liked. I actually lived those memories, Jadus, I don't just have them."
• He stared at me waiting for some kind of approval that never came. Whether it was frustration at us or the sheer hopelessness of the situation, Tyler withdrew his weapon. Denton responded in kind, but Tyler hardly flinched. He held his gun like a prop - not aimed in any particular direction - while Denton had his firearm dead center on the frail man.
• "Drop it, Tyler"
• Yet Tyler, seemingly unaware of his own escalation, continued in an almost taunting voice.
• "Be careful now, if you shoot me - you'll all die."
• A threat. Was it a trap after all?
• Now that he felt he had leverage, he continued from his soapbox, "Did you even exist before this moment? Before you came into my life? I bet you think you did, but I can tell you that you didn't. You for sure fucking didn't. You're all made up for me - you're all ancillary."
• It's amost like he had been rehearsing this.
• "Wow," I shot back, "Of all the code talkers we could have run into, we happened to find god himself. What do you make of that, Denton?"
• He paused for a second as if I interrupted his performance. He began to slowly lower his hands to his sides. The dramatic show was finally over.
• His eyes suddenly flashed with fire, as if he had solved some kind of internal riddle in his head, and he loudly inhaled.
• My mind was able to process what was happening for what seemed like a full minute, but my body had less than a second to respond. "Wuh-" was the only thing that seemed to escape my mouth while god made a much more profound statement.
• With a defiant crescendo, god jammed his .38 into his jaw and opened a skylight in his head. He crumpled lifelessly to the ground, leaving the rest of us behind to persist in the doomed world he supposedly had created.
• Probably not. It was far more likely that Tyler was just another scared man unable to reconcile with the new world.
• Would be funny though.

The light and interference return briefly and the video ends.

Gallery

The following images were used as thumbnails leading up to the premiere:

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The following was found via spectrogram:

• Transmission spectrogram.png

Notes

• This video confirms that Tyler's last name is Lawman, connecting him to the family from the Newspaper Letter.
• On April 4, 2020, this video's file extension was changed from .wmv to .txt in order to differentiate the text-based format from videos containing gameplay footage.