Finding Essy's name

From Intimation

After navigating our way through all the "cornfield" pages (see Retrieving Skulls and Navigating into the AI), we found Essy, sitting and seemingly sleeping, with one final NAVPATH-style box...except in front of this box, there was the question, "WHO... WHO AM I?"

Eridanos tweeted,

So, we've got this far, now we need to name her? I guess it's not Essy. What could her name be?

We remembered that the memory cards that had been discovered in Portland had contained text files with the following text:

WHO-AM-I
//I AM BROKEN, ALONE, NAMELES

WHO-AM-I
//I AM DREAMING, WITH BIG EYES

WHO-AM-I
//I AM NATIVE AMERICAN

WHO-AM-I
//I AM LIKE ANKAA, THE BRIGHT ONE IN THE BOAT

ancalime brought this up to Eridanos, and he suggested we run with that idea:

[ancalime] @eridanos01 Seems like we might still be short two skulls in our collection -- think they could be out there, holding a clue to Essy's name?
[Eridanos] @ancalime I don't know. Do we have anything that might shed some light on her name?
[ancalime] @eridanos01 Got those dream skulls a few weeks back: "LIKE ANKAA" "NATIVE AMERICAN" "BROKEN, ALONE, NAMELES" [sic] "DREAMING, WITH BIG EYES"
[Eridanos] That's got to be it @ancalime, it's got to be there. Every child had a name - she just needs hers!

[Several hours later]

[ancalime] @eridanos01 Hm. We thought some kind of star name from Native American myth, but the variety and spelling diffs out there...yikes, big hunt.
[Eridanos] Well, I'm just going to try Google for now, I guess, and look for Native American names that seem related to those descriptions.

anaerin mentioned in chat finding a website http://www.20000-names.com/female_native_american_names.htm at that had a bunch of female Native American names. drizjr eventually ended up on that same page through using Google, and noticed a particular name:

84. NAIRA: Native American Quechua name meaning "big eyes."

(drizjr also mentioned that further research showed that this is also a name in Aymara.)

drizjr tried that in the box, and reports, "When that name was first entered on the "Who...who am I?" page, there was no message from S5 at the top. I guess that was the signal that it was the first."

The page at the end of the "cornfields" changed drastically at this point. Instead of showing a sitting/sleeping Essy, it showed this image:

At this point, the homepage at http://thewaytheirworldended.com/ changed to include a black rectangle over the original introductory text, containing these words:

>S5:MSG//ALERT/MODULE CORE HEMORRHAGE

>S5:MSG//STONEWALL INTEGRITY/FLUCTUATING
>S5:MSG//SIGNAL/SLIPSPACE SIGNATURE

>>S5:REQ>S*//RECON/STANDBY


>S1:MSG//STANDBY
>S2:MSG//STANDBY
>S3:MSG//STANDBY
>S4:MSG//STANDBY
>S5:MSG//OBSERVING

>>S5:MSG//INTERFACE ANALYSIS//LAST LOGGED EXTERNAL COMM:"NAIRA"

Red herrings

The image name - 23 Zs

When we viewed the image of Essy sitting on its own, the name of the image file was found to be ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.PNG . Besides giving us the idea that she was meant to be sleeping in that picture, this also led to an idea that the name to be put in the box had to be 23 characters long. In addition, since we had found 22 skulls as part of navigating the cornfield, it was thought that each of those characters would come from one of the skulls (perhaps from the name of the skull or the name of the child represented), and that the 23rd character would represent Essy. This, of course, turned out not to be the case.

The final breadcrumb and Dreaming Eyes' necklace

Part of the breadcrumb on the last cornfield page read:

I will treasure her gift, forever, and ever. Maybe one day it will tell me who I am.

We figured out that this referred to Dreaming Eyes' necklace, but the final solution had nothing to do with this (in fact, we temporarily thought it had provided the answer, since ancalime typed in Mebsuta around the same time that drizjr typed in Naira--Mebsuta being the name of one of the stars in Gemini, which the necklace depicts).

Dream skull text files

The dream skulls did tell us that we were looking for a Native American name, and the name did have to do with "big eyes." We could surmise that "WHO-AM-I" and "I AM BROKEN, ALONE, NAMELES [sic]" were meant to cue us to use these files whenever we reached the "WHO... WHO AM I?" page. However, "I AM DREAMING" had no impact on the final answer (unless perhaps it was to reaffirm that the descriptions were of Dreaming Eyes/Essy), nor did "I AM LIKE ANKAA, THE BRIGHT ONE IN THE BOAT".