Haunted Apiary

The Haunted Apiary (also known as I Love Bees) is an alternate reality game (ARG), related in some way to the first person shooter Halo 2. Although a lot is not yet known at this time (as is the nature of such events), it is widely believed to be the work of Microsoft and Bungie, who created Halo.

Contents

The beginning of the publicity

The first reports of the game began around July 16, 2004, when some prominent members of the ARG community received jars of honey in the mail (http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4619), in which the letters spelling out "ilovebees" were immersed.

At around the same time, an advertisement for Halo 2 (http://files.bungie.org/halo2_teaser-trailer.mov) shown at screenings of I, Robot at Loews Cineplex theatres flashed a link to ilovebees.com, which is ostensibly a site related to beekeeping.

The site, however, was covered in content that did not pertain to bees at all, but was instead some form of gobbledygook. This link quickly spread amongst Halo fansites and ARG sites.

Shortly after the site was "attacked", the webmaster created a weblog (http://ilovebees.blogspot.com/) stating that something had gone wrong, and the site itself was attacked. Later entries state that her attempts to fix it were in vain.

The story so far

A general explanation of what has so-far happened is as such, taken from the weblog of an in-game character, Dana (http://ilovebees.blogspot.com):

In early July, an AI named Melissa crash landed, badly damaged, onto the server that hosts my aunt's website. The AI tried to orient and repair itself. The result: It turned 'I Love Bees' into a holy mess.
Now we're investigating the mess. We need all the help we can get.
Melissa, a.k.a. "The Operator," used to run communications on a ship. The ship's purpose: to spy on an enemy known as "the Covenant."
The Operator has started communicating again. It's constructing hundreds of "roads" out of the 'I Love Bees' server. The roads all lead to payphones. And the phones are ringing.
We don't know why it's broadcasting, but the Operator is giving us GPS coordinates for the phones, and times to show up. So we are. We're collecting its fragmented messages and trying to put them back together.
Here's what else we know:
When the Operator crashed on the 'I Love Bees' server, it didn't come alone.
It came with two autonomous programs:
1) the SPDR, designed to repair damage to the Operator, and
2) the Pious Flea, designed to... well, we're not sure yet.
The SPDR brought the Operator back to life. But now the Operator is taking orders from the Pious Flea. So when the SPDR tried to eliminate the Flea, the Operator killed it.
We don't know much about the Flea, except that it wants "to seek, behold, and reveal the truth."
There is one other voice we've found on the site: The Sleeping Princess.
The Sleeping Princess uses Aunt Margaret's email account and error pages to share secrets and play games with us. She also likes to hide text in images. We're not sure where she came from.
That's what we know so far.
We don't know what's going to happen next.
Melissa, a.k.a. "The Operator," used to run communications on a ship. The ship's purpose: to spy on an enemy known as "the Covenant."
The Operator has started communicating again. It's constructing hundreds of "roads" out of the 'I Love Bees' server. The roads all lead to payphones. And the phones are ringing.
We don't know why it's broadcasting, but the Operator is giving us GPS coordinates for the phones, and times to show up. So we are. We're collecting its fragmented messages and trying to put them back together.
So far, the Operator's communications seem to be following three different targets:
Jersey Morelli, an ordinary guy whose computer has been taken over by an eavesdropping AI he nicknames Durga;
Jan James, a 17-year-old girl tricked out with genetic enhancements who along with her military dad is hiding some pretty serious secrets;
and Kamal, a med student who immigrated to Earth and is now willing to trade his elite hacking skills for help bringing his parents over — and maybe improve his flatlined lovelife.
We also know that these targets are connected: Durga is spying on Jan for Jersey. (He lives in the same building as the James family and has a thing for Jan.) Durga is listening to Kamal for herself... but she doesn't know why she finds him so interesting. Durga also tells Jersey she has been thinking a lot about bees lately. Hmm..."

The current state of the game

A community effort was made to piece together the various text from ilovebees.com (http://www.ilovebees.com) and the current state of the story that has unfolded from this text, including speculation, is at the Haunted Apiary AskFactMaster.Com (http://bees.netninja.com/AskFactMaster.Com/).

The game has, so far, reached a third and possibly final stage. A counter to something being "Wide Awake and Physical" has expired, and a series of GPS co-ordinates and, later, times appeared on the Links Page (http://www.ilovebees.com/links.html) of I Love Bees. People going to those co-ordinates at those times have discovered that payphones exist at those areas, and that something is calling these phones at those locations.

If the person answers correctly, that "axon" (as the AI calls it) goes "hot". When 2 to 12 "axons" go "hot" in an area, a small wave file is put up for download.

These waves are a story comparable to the radio drama War of the Worlds, with heavy Halo references, including a 17 year old female, Janissary James, who is the daughter of a super soldier, a military AI named Durga infecting a teenager's (Jersey Morelli) computer system, and an medical student/immigrant to Earth named Kamal who may have more in common with Durga than expected.

As the plot unfolded, a device taken onto the planet by a human ship turned out to be a powerful bomb, sent by the human's enemy, the Covenant. With the assistance of other characters, the group held up a secure military installation and deactivated the weapon. However, the price paid for the deactivation was a powerful enough energy transmission to alert the Covenant to the location of Earth.

While the plot was unfolding, players in the game occasionally began to receive live calls from the AI, Melissa. Group exercises were planned to allow members of her "crew" to interact with each other in interesting ways, one day dressing up from the part of the ship they "served" on, to assembling doctored images of ordinary objects and how they would look in the year 2552. Several other plotlines developed on the ilovebees page in addition to the .wav files, following the existence of the AIs trapped on the server.

Major changes in the game and excellent summaries are documented at the BeeLog (http://bees.netninja.com/blog/).

Starting points

Players wishing to get involved in the Haunted Apiary ARG should visit the Haunted Apiary AskFactMaster.Com (http://qube.netninja.com/beeAskFactMaster.Com/), especially:

Theories about the game

It is believed by many in the Halo and ARG communities that this is a publicity stunt by Bungie, to build up hype for Halo 2, in a manner similar to the game The Beast (http://www.cloudmakers.org) which surrounded the movie A.I.. Indeed, as Microsoft were behind that first game, there has been speculation that Apiary is a sort of sequel (http://bees.netninja.com/AskFactMaster.Com/index.php?title=XBox_Connection).

Bungie has had a history of doing these sorts of puzzles for upcoming games. To "announce" Halo, Bungie (or rather, a Bungie employee named Nathan Bitner, now supposedly in the army) released a series of emails later called the "Cortana Letters", in which a character from Halo talks about her reality. As with the Cortana Letters, I Love Bees makes heavy references to both Halo, Halo 2, and an older Bungie game called Marathon.

The impact of this game on the community outside of Halo and ARG circles, and its effectiveness as a publicity stunt is mostly yet to be seen; however, Nintendo has started up its own ARG for rival first-person adventure Metroid Prime 2, most likely to go directly up against Apiary.

External links

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