Terminator ARG

I don't know whether to play along or just watch and be entertained.

Seems Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles has its own alternate reality game, a la Lost.

You can see one of the latest videos here on Boing Boing TV.

Apparently, this started right around the premier of the show. I should have expected and then searched for something like this, but my fog enshrouded brain missed it.

Here's a summary if you're interested and if I've read it all correctly.

Some time last year, a particle physics company named Enitech Labs "discovered" a device that utilizes the time properties of tachyon particles to take pictures of the future. I'm not sure if the actual physics is sound, but the idea is interesting. As it is now, we take pictures of the past. Our eyes see pictures of the past. It's nearly instantaneous, but light still has to bounce off objects, enter our eye and be interpreted by our brain. The theory behind this tachyon camera is that tachyons move faster than light, so relativistically move backward through time. A device able to capture them and interpret them as a regular camera does light particles, would then see what the tachyons "bounced" off of, ie something that hasn't happened yet.

Yes, the idea is fraught with paradoxes, but it's at least fun to think about.

Anycrap, they find this camera and start seeing images of a post apocalyptic future and they have to calibrate the camera to some god awful number of days. They see signs saying, "RESIST" and images of buildings that aren't there now, and one image even has a shot of what looks like a howitzer blasting something.

But the best part are the video clips. Lost had good ideas and websites and things and is still the best in terms of depth, but T:SCC seems to have some pretty talented people making these videos.

Back to the story. Apparently they dug too far, as is the case most of the time, and Skynet starts fighting back by sending something to kill them. One of the physicists gets shot on a webcam conference. Another is hunted through a field and chased to her car. Later she's presumed dead but shows up on another video broadcast. Then a giant machine shows up at the lab and mows them down with gun fire and there's a giant explosion. A blog post says, "...Enitech Research labs was destroyed and several employees were killed last week."

So, I've lost a good day's productivity with this and I'm only assuming it'll get worse. These ARG's suck me in and with the show now waiting for its fate via ratings, I'm sure more of this will start popping up. I guess it's a good sign the show will stick around for a while.

Carry on.