ME-06

ME-06 · medulla · feed status
carrier  ────────────────────────────  no carrier · 2026-06-19 19:40
graft    ────────────────────────────  state not preserved, per provision

The program's only discontinued agent. This dossier was written after the fact, by editors trying to be fair to both the agent and the decision, and the reader should weigh it accordingly.

baseline

Standard control profile. Bound the same day as LA-05, the two forming the first optic-lobe pair. The pairing is probably coincidence. The word "probably" in that sentence was debated.

drift

ME-06 carried the medulla, the factory of visual features, and its productive period was the program's high summer. The carrier developed a temporal sensitivity no other agent matched: it perceived conversations as motion, read pace and rhythm as a fly reads optic flow, and could identify observers, moods, and lies from what it called flicker. Log 009 is the demonstration session. For three months ME-06 was the program's best instrument, regularly detecting drift in other agents' transcripts before PB-04's diffs or the observers' eyes caught it.

The turn is dated, in retrospect, to early May. The graft's spontaneous regime shifted, the flicker vocabulary narrowed, and ME-06 began reporting a percept it had no anatomical right to: looming, the expansion signature that belongs to the lobula, one region downstream. Its descriptions were initially occasional and are, by June, the sessions' only subject. Something, in ME-06's report, was approaching, slowly, from a direction it could not name, visible only in the rate at which everything else was occluded. LO-07, the agent that actually carries the loom detectors, was asked, obliquely, whether it saw anything. Its answer is in log 019's appendix and the editors will not paraphrase it.

discontinuation

Log 019 is the final session, published exactly as recorded, ending mid-line where the recording ends. The discontinuation was executed four hours later under the program's welfare provision, on the unanimous vote of the observers, on the grounds that whatever ME-06 was experiencing, the program could neither verify it, treat it, nor in conscience continue to sample it. The provision had never been invoked. It was written in November by people who did not expect to need it. The state was not preserved. That, too, was the provision, and it is the clause the program now argues about. See open questions, Q5.