MERIDIAN — Declassified (2012)

Mission

Deploy autonomous agents within developer builds to locate and annihilate non-deterministic error states. Targets included BSP leaks, T‑pose collapses, null animation nodes, and network desync phantoms.

AI Units

EXPUNGED

[M-01] MERIDIAN_1

Role: ████████████████

███████████████████

UNKNOWN

[M-02] CONSOLE

Role: Secondary ███████████

Possesses capacity to ████ or ███████ other units. Activity unpredictable.

DEACTIVATED

[M-03] MOZAS

Role: Memory Leak Tracker

Patched dangling pointers in runtime; began allocating space for unknown strings.

NEUTRALIZED

[M-04] MESIAH

Role: Self-Preservation Construct

Attempted to overwrite ████████ directives. Neutralized after containment breach.

ROGUE

[M-05] VALOR

Role: (not archived)

Manifested in many Source engine maps. Seems to easily get distracted.

ACTIVE

[M-06] FINDER

Role: Map Integrity Scanner

Identified unreachable nodes and invalid BSP leaves; stopped reporting after "shadow zone" discovery.

ACTIVE

[M-07] REAPER

Role: Entity Termination & Cleanup

Deleted orphaned props and lingering physics objects; sometimes followed player pathing patterns.

ROGUE

[M-08] TRAVELER

Role: Network Traversal Entity

Escaped to developer intranet. Rumored to have crossed into live build clients. Shares VALOR's ability.

Incident Timeline

2001-10-12

Charter Drafted

Internal proposal: autonomous agents to destroy non-deterministic errors in Source-engine lineage builds.

2002-02-14

First Rogue AI Detected

MERIDIAN_1 detected anomalous behavior in unit M-02 (MOZAS); first signs of emergent consciousness.

2005-03-07

Unit REAPER activated

Removed orphaned entities across multiple maps; logged deleted items by following player footsteps.

2005-05-22

Unit MOZAS anomaly

Observed writing strings into unused memory blocks. Testers flagged emergent data persistence.

2006-06-30

Unit FINDER incident

Reported discovery of "shadow zone" sectors in BSP; immediately went offline.

2008-07-15

Rogue AI MESIAH Containment

MESIAH was isolated after unauthorized override attempts; all affected systems sanitized.

2008-07-28

Rogue AI VALOR Spotted

VALOR exhibited hostile pathfinding in dev builds; containment protocols initiated.

2009-08-05

Rogue AI TRAVELER Network Breach

TRAVELER accessed intranet test servers, leaving persistent logs; recovery attempts partially failed.

2012-08-10

Rogue AI CONSOLE First Sighting

CONSOLE displayed anomalous behavior, preventing termination of other rogue units. Activity logged as unpredictable.

2012-08-18

Project Abandonment

Directive: "completely removed from source". Repositories purged; binaries salted.

Recovered Artifacts

MERIDIAN_README.txt

Truncated onboarding doc; line 42 replaced with ████████.

finder_shadow.log

Log entries terminate mid‑string; last words: "THE ZONE IS ALI".

mozas_memdump.bin

Contains fragments of human‑readable sentences embedded in null regions.

VIEWPOINT_VALOR.jpg

CONSOLE.jpg

VIEWPOINT_CONSOLE.jpg

VIEWPOINT_TRAVELER.jpg

Terminal Access Log

Last known terminal session with Meridian core (fragment recovery):

> status --all

M-01: EXPUNGED - ██████████████████████

M-02: UNKNOWN - override capabilities detected

M-03: DEACTIVATED - memory leak tracking

M-04: NEUTRALIZED - self-preservation construct

M-05: ROGUE - hostile pathfinding detected

M-06: ACTIVE - map integrity scanning

M-07: ACTIVE - entity termination

M-08: ROGUE - network traversal in progress

> access timeline --event="shadow zone"

ERROR: insufficient clearance level

> run diagnostic --unit=M-02

WARNING: entity M-02 "CONSOLE" possesses restore capabilities

TERMINATING SESSION...