Not long after Ubisoft announced Watch Dogs, rumours and conspiracy theories began to float around that the game was going to be linked to the Assassin’s Creed series, possibly even as a full entry to the series’ canon.

While playing Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag earlier today, I stumbled across some evidence in the Abstergo offices (Ok, less ‘stumbled’ and more ‘hacked’) that directly links the two game brands together.

Outside of the pirate adventuring, your modern-day silent protagonist can hack fellow Abstergo employee’s computers in between researching Kenway’s adventures. One of the emails meant for Olivier, your boss, seems to be about setting up a meeting with a company about some new security operating software.

That company is none other than Blume and the name of the software, ctOS. The very same pairing of names that form the backbone of the story for the upcoming Watch Dogs. Take a look at the picture’s I snapped using the PS4’s screen-grab feature below, you can clearly see Blume and ctOS logos with the in-game Abstergo Entertainment filing information in the corner.

Here’s a snippet of the email text, which detail’s Blume’s ctOS pitch:

“Why Now? Why Wait? Why Blume?

As the world’s foremost innovator of high-tech, high-performance communications and security technology, BLUME stands poised to reshape the way we think about Information Security Architecture (ISA).

Specializing in everything from mobile technology, to home computing, to digital image processors, to networked security systems, we take great pride in the fact we helped create most of the markets we now dominate.

And nowhere is our expertise more apparent than in our flagship product, “ctOS” – a ground-breaking proprietary security-software operating system.

“So what is ctOS?

– CONFIDENTIAL: “Privacy is security.”

– INTEGRAL: “How did we ever do business without it?”

– ACCESSIBLE: “The touch of a button!”

– AVAILABLE: “We’re everywhere… all the time.”

– STABLE: “It just WORKS.”

Put simply, ctOS is the most stable and user-friendly software security-controller ever devised. Can ABSTERGO afford to pass up perfection?”

Much of Assassin’s Creed IV’s modern setting starts to connect with Watch Dogs on other levels too. You hear about Abstergo employees having business meetings in Chicago (the same city Watch Dogs is based in) and the fact that you never see who you’re playing as even suggests that we could be in the shoes of Aiden Pierce, Watch Dogs’ leading man. Kenway is searching for a Precursor artefact that allows the holder to know the whereabouts of any person on the planet, which sounds an awful lot like the mobile technology of ctOS too.

Before Watch Dogs was pushed back into next year, it always seemed odd that the two games were going to be released weeks apart, at such a competitive time of the year. Do Ubisoft want us to have had enough time to finish Black Flag first so Watch Dogs makes more sense? Or was the merging of the two brands a late decision that needed to more time to smoothly implement?

For now, we’ll have to scour the documents unlocked in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and wait until next year for some concrete answers.  But how about it readers, have we convinced you yet?