If you have completed Everybody's Gone To the Rapture and watched the credits to the very end, you may have seen this coded message:



Study the code and a few patterns become clear. For example, some groups of numbers repeat, but strikingly, there is a repeating one-number "word", namely "1".
In English there is a specific one-letter word that gets repeated all the time: the determiner "a" (a man, a horse, a question). This is the key to solving this code.

If "1" = "A" then maybe ...



This turns out to be correct. It is a matter of replacing a number with a letter.
However, as shown above, in the code some letters are represented by a pair of numbers.
So, the challenge here is to group the numbers correctly.
Fortunately, a) the word breaks are given in the code, and b) if 1=A all the way to 26=Z, then the highest number will be 26, which means that "914" can only be separated as "9/1/4" or "9/14", since there is no 91 in the solution, etc.

Following this method, the code neatly solves into:



Or cleared up:



The message seems to be relevant to what the player encounters in the game, a kind of clue or guide to interpret what is experienced. It seems to shed light on the nature of the glowing orbs and streaks as the (conscious?) remnants of humans that were once alive but are now present as "afterglows" to those still around.

"Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics" (Wikipedia).

He holds a PhD in Physics (University of Oregon, 1975).
"His study of the energy levels of Bloch electrons in a magnetic field led to his discovery of the fractal known as Hofstadter's butterfly" (Wikipedia).

His long list of publications include:
∙ Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979, won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and the National Book Award).
∙ I Am a Strange Loop (2007, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology).


Rendering of Hofstadter's butterfly (or Gplot, as he called the figure)
By Douglas Hofstadter, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5044529

Some definitions:

∞ Wikipedia, page: "Hofstadter's butterfly":
"In condensed matter physics, Hofstadter's butterfly is a graph of the spectral properties of non-interacting two-dimensional electrons in a perpendicular magnetic field in a lattice. The fractal, self-similar nature of the spectrum was discovered in the 1976 PhD work of Douglas Hofstadter and is one of the early examples of modern scientific data visualization. The name reflects the fact that, as Hofstadter wrote, 'the large gaps [in the graph] form a very striking pattern somewhat resembling a butterfly'".

∞ Dilip D'Souza, One butterfly at a time (online article, livemint):
"Now in a very real way, mathematics lives on patterns ... Entire careers have flowered in the search for meaning in such patterns, maybe even more so when they can be defined and described recursively, in terms of themselves, as Hofstadter’s pattern was."
Hofstadter's graph "depicts the energy level of electrons in crystals when subjected to a magnetic field" ... It "capture[s] the relationship between the energy levels of these electrons and the magnetic field [...]"

All very technical, but how does it tie into the game?

Patterns intrigue the human mind. They imply some kind of a design, a deliberate sequence produced with some purpose in mind, a hidden message maybe, a secret to be revealed, the answer to something monumental.

Humans have forever been looking for meaning in patterns. We make use of patterns to make sense of the world around us. We look up to the sky at night and recognise the constellations, star patterns we devised to tell about and explain the gods and myths, and to help us navigate the earth and heavens. We ponder over mathematical equations, the patterns in numbers, which we use to derive geometric structures and graphs from, and formulate and solve theoretical problems.

Images like these are found throughout the game world.

In Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, the characters Kate Collins and Stephen Appleton, as scientists working at the observatory, find themselves at the centre of the search for what is happening to their world. A strange light pattern has been observed in the sky. A vast amount of data is streaming in in the form of groups of paired numbers. Kate attempts to make sense of it, looks for meaning in the data, studying and trying to communicate with the pattern. This is the main instance of the pattern theme in the game from which all other pattern-related instances follow. The player will encounter these number patterns on radios, TVs and PCs he or she interacts with throughout the game. The player may recognise other number patterns, like the date of the apocalyptic event (6 6 84) given on every bus stop sign, and analogue and digital clocks all showing the exact same time.





The BUTTERFLY is used quite extensively as a visual theme throughout the game world. For example, it is found in the form of:
∙ the real insects flying about
∙ butterfly pictures used on signs bearing place names
∙ butterfly-like badges on the front of vehicles
∙ butterfly-like markings on maps of the region
∙ painted symbols on doors and walls
∙ printed graphs in frames on walls or elsewhere
∙ In one of Kate's recordings she also mentions a "butterfly burn" on her skin after contact with the pattern.



It is in this last image that the coded reference to Douglas Hofstadter and his "Gplot" or butterfly graph becomes very obvious.
This link with Hofstadter's quote,
"In the wake of a human being's death, what survives is a set of afterglows,
some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of those dearest to them ...
There is, in those who remain, a collective corona that still glows",
may imply some things game-wise:
that the player, in the role of someone who has remained behind, is interacting with the "afterglows" (floating lights) of the deceased, triggering their memories, conversations and interactions with others in order to gradually form a picture (make sense) of what has occurred in the village, not just in relation to the event that killed them all, but also as to the nature of their relationships with one another.



In the end Everybody's Gone To The Rapture is a human story. Human lives "take form" through revealing their fears, their sorrows, desires, their innermost being.

Communication is at the heart of being human. It is how we relate to one another. The game is filled with all kinds of communication devices: phones, radios, tape machines, PCs, satellite dishes, maps and books. For the player, activating some of the memories is literally done by "tuning into their frequency" as if using a radio's dialing knob, moving the mouse/controller to the left or right until the signal bursts into clarity. He or she makes "contact" with characters' thoughts and memories. Kate Collins tries to make contact with the pattern; she feels it is trying to communicate, that she has to connect with this mysterious entity by adjusting the observatory's optical array. She even senses that the pattern is lonely and scared, that it is sentient and has travelled very very far and needs to be comforted. As an outsider herself, she knows what it means to be lonely. Is this a case of emotional transfer on her part? Is she attributing emotions to the pattern because she is in dire need for companionship herself after her fallout with Stephen?

Everybody wants to belong, to be connected to someone or something. This is evident from the lives of the deceased, from the revealed relationships with one another; between husbands and wives, mother and son, between friends, young lovers, a doctor and his patients, between a priest and God. There are feelings of love, hate, deceit, anger, disappointment, worry, hope, jealousy, heartache, etc. This makes everything all the more tragic in the light of the event that wiped out the village. So many lives snuffed out at the same time in a single instant; so many unresolved issues, chances to make up, all taken away without closure or remedy, without finding meaning.

So what is it that the player hears in the echoes from the deceased's remains? Are the sounds coming from the afterglows merely echoes of memories and conversations, or are they the restless cries from unresolved lives demanding justice or a second chance? What really remains after we pass on? What becomes of the human consciousness? Will we only be alive in the memories of the living? What happens when there is no one left to remember you?

We don't know when death will come for us. How does one get ready for an event that is inevitable yet unpredictable? Maybe the best anyone can hope for is to have loved and to have been loved in return, and that, when the time comes to leave this world, to have few regrets and to know that you belonged and left peace and kindness in your wake.



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