The following account was recorded in the agent's log during your transmission: The sky's like a bright, pale pink above a sprawling, partially flooded Walmart, sunlight pouring in through a huge hole in the ceiling, illuminating a mess of mangled, rusting shopping carts and plastic debris. Umm, there's this perpetual hum, like a bass note, coming from a row of still-functional vending machines, their screens somehow displaying the entirety of the Cicada 3301 cryptogram. Outside, it's snowing – I mean, it's not actually snow, it's somehow tiny, individual, fully-formed quartz crystals falling from the sky. The air's charged with static, and smells of burned electronics.