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[kramdar]

FRAGMENTED MEMORY

[Shad0]

Re: FRAGMENTED MEMORY

[Platonix]

People have been complaining lately that mention of the QUARANTINE pages gets labelled trout, but they can't find any explanation anywhere on this board. Perhaps everyone who understood these pages just assumed everyone else did.
So, for future reference, I shall now explain the QUARANTINE pages. This will involve some explanation of the backstory of this whole ARG, so bear with me.

Melissa, an advanced AI, had a special subroutine called the System Peril Distributed Reflex (abbreviated SPDR and thus commonly referred to as a "Spider".) The SPDR's task was to repair Melissa when she took enough memory damage (mem.dmg) to go offline (when her System was in Peril.)

When Melissa crash-landed on Ilovebees, she was a royal wreck. She was completely offline. This status triggered the activation of the SPDR, and it began its task of repairing her. The very first thing it did was re-activate Melissa (well, the second thing; the first was locating her core program.) This goal was apparently important enough that it was willing to scramble her memory even further in order to accomplish it. You can read in Restoration Phase 1 that this process was quite highly uncomfortable for Melissa.

Some people have criticized SPDR for doing such a horrible job of repairing Melissa. But this is not the whole truth. SPDR had always intended to repair Melissa's memory once it had dealt with The Most Important Problem: getting her to the point where she was functional. For this reason, it archived Melissa's memories starting from the moment it was first activated...and it quarantined those archives so that nothing could distort them until it was ready to re-integrate them. Those quarantined archives are the pages listed here, and they will never contain any new clues to the ARG because they are quarantined and thus unalterable by anything in the system.

The reason Phase 2 has different URLs, and the reason these memories have not, in fact, been re-integrated into Melissa by now, is that the SPDR was destroyed during Phase 2. Melissa herself created the quarantined archive of Phase 2, and there is nothing to work on re-integrating them into her system.

There is a META reason for these pages, quite aside from the in-game reason. On a META level, these pages exist so that people just being introduced to this ARG can see what came before. The QUARANTINE pages are exact replicas of the Ilovebees site as it appeared in the various Phases of this game, all the way back to Day 1.

[kramdar]

Re: FRAGMENTED MEMORY

[Centipede]

Is there a 'pre-crash' archive of the site?

[krystyn]

Centipede, to my knowledge, the only extant view we have of the site before it got Melissafied is some screenshots Dana took and posted on her blog.

Other than that, we entered the story post-crash.

[Shad0]

Re: FRAGMENTED MEMORY