new ARG "Personal Protocol", anyone wanna help me research?

so, a music artist ive been listening to for a while called 8485 recently came out with a new EP that shes been slowly releasing the past few months. i dont do social media besides spacehey and tumblr so i had no idea she had been rolling it out or any of the cryptic stuff shes been doing alongside it. (although i have now gone and watched all of her tiktoks, very interesting stuff.)

the new EP "Software Gore" is only 9 minutes long but it has a really really strong story that pulled me in immediately when i first listened, and since it was so short and 8485 is a relatively obscure artist i was DESPERATE for more info. i checked the EP's description on bandcamp and found this:

I’d like to be clear that nothing here is meant as an endorsement of Jay “Spec” Doherty/deathrayspec or Cass Bleecker/Ctrl_machine. On the off chance that any of my followers have fallen down the same niche Internet rabbit holes as I have, the association might be obvious.

It's none of my business to speculate about the truth of other people's lives and I’d be the last to inflict that on anyone else. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, just a person who was drawn into a story because it’s easy to see yourself in a blurry image. What it inspired for me should be treated as fiction (a lot of you seem to call everything “lore” anyway, so feel free to keep it up for now.)

Visit personalprotocol.net for more information.

 shes posted that message or a similar one on all social media platforms as far as i can tell, some with slight variations but all the same gist. i was concerned it was real at first, but upon exploring the website i have found its pretty obviously an ARG. when you first click on the link you are given this message:

My independent cybersecurity skills are not that great, so i’m not that surprised to see my research + WIPs leaked, but i am pretty sad. My guess is that other ppl who shared my curiosity re: the Ctrl_machine/deathrayspec case didn’t like my efforts to make myself seem different from them. In some ways i’m not.

“software gore” is a story which came from curiosity. The reasons i got curious aren’t that important; if you’re here, it might be more interesting to consider your own. I am not sure if i did a “good” or “bad” thing but i have come to realize after a lot of worrying that nothing is made more honourable by doing it with shame. So i’ve decided to leave the project guts here for a while. There’s one name i had to censor to keep me out of ultra-trouble, but i did my best to avoid just the real consequences, not the uncomfortable feelings.

on the website you can find "archive" pages of two (i think whats supposed to resemble 4chan?) threads about "deathrayspec" and "Ctrl_machine". one of the threads links to document which is inaccessible via the link provided but you can find it if you search the rest of the website, their commentary is talking about MK ultra and such while the replies argue this document is complete fiction. this is it: https://personalprotocol.net/DEPROGRAMMED.pdf

the other thread links to an mp3 which is a "police interview" also featured on EP. on tiktok eighty (aka 8485 the artist orchestrating all this) says that clip is something she "decided to include last second". the replies in all of the mock archive threads are extremely interesting and im trying really hard to understand what they mean but im not quite there yet.

 ive uncovered other stuff like a police report describing two teenagers impersonating swat officers who attempted a murder, with octal code at the bottom which spells out the name of the second song on the EP (although there was also a lot of non octal characters in the string i couldnt figure out how to decode, they could mean something else in another code.)

im  like obsessed with this now and there is literally no one else online investigating it but me at the moment. im not great at ARGs i usually watch from the sidelines but i really feel like theres stuff here to be uncovered that i'm just not skilled enough to find. if anyone is interested, pleaseeee comment or friend request so we can DM about it, i need other people to get into this desperately.