Bleeding Ink

About ten years ago I stumbled onto a website that, for all intents and purposes, appeared a legitimate portal to the Department of Heuristics and Research on Material Applications—or the Dharma Initiative. It’s Japanese inspired logo gleamed scientific credibility. It’s many pages revealed grants that had gone to scientists and their experiments. It had a contact page, an about page, a page explaining what it was like to work there--it even had job openings. Being a nosy computer nerd, I snooped around the source code and came across some peculiar lines. There was a glaring security hole which I quickly took advantage of—soon I was deep into restricted areas of the site that spoke of a special experiment on a remote island whose participants included Jack, Sayid, Hugo, Kate and so on. I cannot tell you how much time passed. I can only relate to you that my fingers tingled and my heart raced. I had become an active participant in an Alternate Reality Game for the TV show Lost. And it changed my understandi