Station Five of Six: The Pearl
The Pearl
- The Pearl is station five of six, and acts as a monitoring station. It is the question mark on the Blast Door map. The station is one large, octagonal room, in which television sets are fed live surveillance pictures of the other hatches (though the only picture that could be picked up as of ? was from one of the hidden cameras in The Swan.) A camera was also notably visible inside the Pearl.
- According to The Pearl's Orientation video, the staff of The Pearl live there for three weeks, and monitor the occupants of the other stations in eight hour shifts. Whenever a observation notebook is filled, they are placed in a suction tube and sent off to what is only described as 'us'.
- There is a computer identical to the one inside The Swan. However, it displays "Print Log? Y/N". Upon giving the command, the computer prints a repeating series of numeric codes, interspersed by the word "accepted", as "41602064:41 accepted 41602086:29 accepted" etc. The numbers appear to increase, suggesting that they could be time stamps. If they represent minutes and seconds, it works out to about 79 years; if they represent hours and minutes, it works out to 4745 years.
==Theories==
Message Tube
- The Pearl's Orientation video says that the purpose of the video is to study the occupants of the other stations, and says that these occupants think that the work they are doing is extremely important. Perhaps the pushing of the button in the hatch is just as Jack said - nothing but an experiment to see if somebody would do it?
- Also, the orientation video never makes it perfectly clear where the completed notebooks go once they enter the suction tube. Perhaps The Pearl is just an experiment to see if people would fill notebooks, just like The Swan and The Button are implied to be?
- The numbers displayed on the log printout could possibly be the numbers being entered and confirmation of the button being pushed in The Swan.
- The numbers are not hex coding, as that would be the digits 0-9 plus the letters A-F (and sometimes explicitly denoted with a leading "0x").
- The numbers shown on the printout are always an eight-digit value starting with 416020nn, followed by a colon and two more digits. The "nn" values seem to gradually increase (and presumably were smaller earlier in the log), while the digits after the colon always seem to be "41", "05", or "29".
- The log may also reveal the discussion between Michael and "Walt".
- This may be where the message from "Walt" was sent from.