Westworld’s official bot, Aeden, is beginning to glitch out

Westworld fans who signed up for Discover Westworld, HBO’s companion website for the show, received a very interesting email today that may hold some new clues to obsess over.

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Westworld’s first season.]

The email comes from Aeden, a bot that users could direct questions to about the show. In his email, he said he’ll be undergoing some maintenance, but before leaving will answer a few more questions about Ford’s new narrative. Clicking on the link that’s provided brings you to a specific screen, but before any questions get underway, you’ll notice that it glitches out entirely.

The glitch features a scene between Logan and Dolores talking about Westworld and who it belongs to. The glitch doesn’t seem to give anything away necessarily, but if you choose to restore the screen, Aeden reappears and asks if you want to see an early configuration of his code. Accepting the offer will bring you to a new page with code, which can be seen below.

Imgur/mightymousecat

While there may not be anything in there, this isn’t the first time that the Westworld team may have used code to alert fans to something. On the Delos Incorporated website, one Redditor, yenwood, discovered that if you typed “reverie” into the admin box and hit the enter button, a group of hex code was presented. Yenwood then translated the hex code into Base64, a binary-to-text encoding screen, which he further translated into two different links.

The first link is a three-second video, captured from the screen of a Delos tablet, which shows Elsie’s recent activity. The second is a three-second soundbite that features Elsie saying, “Hello?” This has lead to questions in the community about whether that means Elsie is actually alive.

One of the biggest questions that was left at the end of the first season was whether Elsie and Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) were dead or alive. Polygon has written pretty extensively about the way that Westworld handles death — and how unafraid it is to show death on screen — so the fact that Stubbs and Elsie’s bodies were never shown suggests that the two characters are alive.

This new code also seems to confirm that theory, but of course, things could change between now and 2018 when the show returns to HBO. Both the code from Delos’ website and the glitch Aeden suffers on Discover Westworld prove that showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, along with HBO, aren’t going to step back from the series anytime soon. Those looking to keep up with new theories and try to figure things out ahead of the season two premiere should have their hands full.

Westworld has become one of HBO’s biggest shows, and currently holds the record for the most watched first season of any of the networks’ series. The show averaged 12 million viewers an episode, making it bigger than Game of Thrones’ first and second seasons.