Alex: Nice to meet you too, PAC! First question, How did you join Niantic? Did you settle in for other positions before settling down as the decoding chief?
Truthseeker: That is a trick question! PAC is not affiliated with the NIA! As PAC, I try to remain neutral so that my judgement will be less restrained by corporate values. What I do know, is that there isn’t a decoding chief position at the NIA.
Truthseeker: The Tethered Hand worked undercover as a normal Agent when they first joined the Creative Team as a visuals creator for the NIA’s archival.
Truthseeker: Gradually, they infiltrated the system, and started encrypting secret messages in assets, ultimately making connections with Janus. The NIA probably still doesn’t know the Agent identity was a cover.
Alex: Before Tessellation, what’s the feeling/daily life of being the creation of most puzzles in Ingress?
Truthseeker: In case this wasn’t clarified before, the 13-Archetype Decoding Challenges was the effort of a group of passionate Ingress decoders not the Tethered hand or me. It was a fascinating series. Aurora’s Game was the first semi-extensive layered puzzle the Tethered Hand made for Ingress.
Truthseeker: Before that, were mostly snippets of mystery messages in secret intel. The fun part was always the research. Sometimes you would lose track of time, get drawn into rabbit holes too deep.
Truthseeker: The drag part is usually the encryption check/play test, partly because a lot of it is reviewing/proofreading.
Alex: Is there more mystery in tessellations that NIA is working this hard to prevent you from uncovering them.
Truthseeker: I think there is. Good thing you asked, the latest intel I found may be related to some deep secrets.
Truthseeker: Haha, I will hand something over to you after our conversation. I'll have to keep it a secret for now. You'll need to do some decoding!
Alex: We'll get our best decoders fired up for this! The next question is, after Ezekiel taking back NIA, should we expect NIA to be more transparent? What change will he bring to NIA.
Truthseeker: I think they might, but they might also be pretending to be transparent. So we always need to remain skeptical.
Truthseeker: I heard he is working on new ways to communicate with the Agents. That might be something we can look forward to.
Truthseeker: You mentioned you had some questions about the Tessellation. What did you want to know about?
Alex: What's the role of NIA in tessellation? Other than built the website as Tethered Hand.
Truthseeker: Well the Tethered Hand didn't really build the website. It's Janus. Another gateway to mystery, who I don't really know the real identity. Janus is probably kind of like me, a middle person in between Nemesis and NIA.
Truthseeker: I think the NIA sees this as an opportunity to look for creative minds. Which in the end was successful.
Truthseeker: Both Factions turned out to be very creative, dynamic, and motivated.
Alex: Speaking of, Misty Hannah just faction changed from RES to ENL, do you have more news about researcher switching faction?