The Ship · The Meridian

THE SHIP IS LIT

This is the most deliberate decision in the game’s art direction and the most counterintuitive one, so it is worth stating before anything else. The Meridian is not dark. Seven years of emergency power have been running without interruption and every lamp aboard her is still on. The corridors have their light panels, the deck has its floodlight masts, the pit has its edge strips, and there is a lit guide line running down the middle of the corridor floor for anyone who might need to find their way out.

The horror is not that you cannot see. It is that everything works and nobody is here, which Ryn says out loud within a minute of boarding.

RYN · FIRST CORRIDOR, ACT I

The gravity is on. The lights are on. The air is moving. Everything here works. Nobody is here.

You carry a helmet lamp, and for most of the game it is nearly pointless, which is the joke. It dims automatically when the beam has no room, so that standing a metre from a bulkhead does not blow the wall out to white, and it opens up to its full reach down a long dark run. There is exactly one sequence where you need it, and the game takes the ship’s power away to give it to you.

The spine corridor with the ship's power on. Ribs and conduit runs recede north, the ceiling panels are lit, a guide line runs down the middle of the floor, and deck-net monitors are mounted on both walls. — THE SPINE, LIT · SHOT WITH ?ship=a FOR THE CLEANEST VERSION

The same corridor with the power out. The monitors still glow faintly, the ceiling panels are dark, and the only strong light is the red of the command deck at the far end. — THE SAME CORRIDOR, ONE FUNCTION CALL LATER

THE LAYOUT

The Meridian is a wheel rather than a hull. A circular deck about a hundred and forty metres across carries the drive bay at its centre, and everything else stands on that deck as a separate structure. There is a handrail all the way round the rim, which is the edge of the world and is marked as such rather than hidden. Beyond it there are stars.

Coordinates below are the game’s own, given as x and z in metres, with north being the direction of increasing z. They are here because they are useful to anybody taking pictures, and harmless to everybody else.

PLACE	AT	WHAT IS THERE
The drive bay	0, 0	The centre of everything. A flat deck ring around a pit ten metres deep, with the core and its three rings suspended above it. Covered on the drive page.
The Aperture	0, -21.5	The gate itself, eleven metres tall, standing at the bay’s southern edge.
The docking ring	0, -48	Where the Magpie is mated, and where the game opens. Its board reads LAST EGRESS 7 Y AGO.
The airlock	0, 20.5	Twin leaves that slide apart for the living. It is the mouth of the corridor network and it is where CANTOR makes his stand in Act III.
The spine	0, 18.6 to 48	The main corridor, running north from the airlock the length of the ship, with the galley opening off it and a T-junction near the top.
The galley	4.0, 33	A room off the east side of the spine. The table, the duty board, and the tray nobody came back for.
The command deck	0, 52	The command centre module at the head of the spine. The flight log station stands in front of it at z 46.6.
The east branch	1.5 to 16.6, 41	Out toward the habitat ring, the crew berths and the greenhouse.
The west branch	-16.6 to -1.5, 41	Toward the reactor deck and the storage depot. Osei’s weld-marks run along it.
The reactor block	-26, 44	Its console faces the deck at (-19.4, 43.2). The whole district is lit red, and it is the only district that is.
The habitat ring	24, 44 and 35.5, 35.5	Two habitat modules and a dome at (29, 51). The crew berths are in here.
The greenhouse	36 to 44, 42.7 to 51.3	A room you walk into, door on the west side.
The observation tower	-40.7 to -35.3, 9.3 to 14.7	A room you walk into, door on the east side.
The shuttle hangar	36.1 to 47.9, -1.9 to 9.9	A room you walk into, door on the west side, open to the sky.
The escape pod	33, -8	Standing on open deck south of the hangar, fuelled, and prompting from Act III onward.
The deck edge	radius 70	A handrail on posts the whole way round. Past it is nothing at all.

The districts are told apart by the colour of the light hanging over them. Six cluster lamps sit above the ship, and four of them are the cold utility white the Meridian runs everywhere else. The two that are not are over the reactor block and over the docking ring, and both of those are red. You can stand in the middle of the deck and know which way the reactor is without being told, which is the only navigation the game gives you before CANTOR arrives.

THE GALLEY

The galley is one small room off the spine with its own lamp over its own table, and it exists to deliver a single piece of arithmetic. The table is set. Most of the trays have been pushed back the way people push a tray back when they have finished and stood up. One has not been opened.

RYN · AT THE GALLEY TABLE

Six trays. Five pushed back. One still sealed.

She follows it immediately with the observation that does the actual damage, which is not that somebody missed dinner but that nobody went to look for them. The wall board in the same room has been agreeing with her for seven years, and it is the only board on the ship whose numbers do not match each other.

The galley table under a single ceiling lamp, with trays pushed back along it. The duty board on the far wall reads GALLEY / DUTY ROSTER, BREAKFAST 0700, SEATED 6, TRAYS RETURNED 5. — SEATED 6 · TRAYS RETURNED 5

THE FOUR BOARDS

Four wall monitors are mounted around the ship, each carrying one status board, and between them they tell you most of the premise without a line of dialogue. They are mounted flat against real surfaces at eye height and a bit, in the bays the corridor panelling leaves empty, so they read as fixtures rather than as exposition.

BOARD	AT	WHAT IT SAYS
AIRLOCK / DOCK 1	1.27, 24.6	SEAL MATED. CYCLES 1. And flagged in red: LAST EGRESS 7 Y AGO. One cycle, seven years ago, and nobody has gone out since.
MERIDIAN / FLIGHT LOG	1.27, 46.15	ENTRIES 4118. FLAGGED 1. And in red: DO NOT PLAY THE CROSSING. It is beside the log station, so you read the warning twice.
GALLEY / DUTY ROSTER	4.20, 34.5	BREAKFAST 0700. SEATED 6. And in red: TRAYS RETURNED 5.
REACTOR / CORE	-20.85, 44.6	OUTPUT 98.4%. UPTIME 2557 D. And in red: NO HAND ON THIS DECK. Two thousand five hundred and fifty-seven days is seven years, and the reactor has been at ninety-eight per cent for every one of them.

A wall monitor in the corridor, close enough to read. It reads AIRLOCK / DOCK 1, SEAL MATED, CYCLES 1, LAST EGRESS 7 Y AGO. — THE AIRLOCK BOARD · ONE CYCLE, SEVEN YEARS AGO

SPOILER · WHAT THE SCREENS DO ONCE THE REACTOR COMES BACK · ACT II

Every screen aboard the ship changes at the same moment, and not only these four. The corridor panels, the console displays and the wall boards all stop reporting the ship and start showing one identical frame: a red ring with an interior too dark to be a picture of anything, captioned INTERIOR / NO CAMERA MOUNTED.

It is the inside of the Aperture. There is no camera in there. Nobody ever mounted one, and the caption is the ship being honest about that while displaying the feed anyway.

The same monitor after the reactor comes back. It now shows a red ring seen from the inside, with a caption under it that reads NO CAMERA MOUNTED. — INTERIOR / NO CAMERA MOUNTED

THE LOG STATION

A field console standing on the deck in front of the command centre, at (0, 46.6), with one entry flagged and a red light pulsing beside it. The pulse is not decoration. It steadies the moment you read the entry, which means the ship has been trying to get somebody’s attention for seven years and has now succeeded.

Reading it and playing it are two separate interactions, and the prompt changes between them from READ THE FLIGHT LOG to PLAY THE CROSSING. The game makes you do it twice on purpose. Afterwards the console has nothing more to say, and says so.

The command deck console at the north end of the spine, with a red strip still pulsing under its screen. A board on the wall reads MERIDIAN / FLIGHT LOG, ENTRIES 4118, FLAGGED 1, DO NOT PLAY THE CROSSING. — THE COMMAND DECK · 4118 ENTRIES, ONE OF THEM FLAGGED

THE THREE INTERIORS

Act III sends you to three places on the outer deck, and each of them is a room you walk into rather than a panel you walk up to. They were built specifically to have characters of their own, and they are the only three interiors on the ship besides the galley.

The greenhouse

The one living place aboard. Four planting beds under warm work-lights on their own bars, with an aisle down the middle wide enough to walk, and everything in the beds has grown wild in seven unattended years. It is the only warm light in the game that is not either the drive or a fire. The access panel is inside, on the far wall, so getting to it means going all the way in.

The observation tower

Lights out. Nothing in this room is lit except by your helmet lamp, which is where the lamp finally earns its place. There are two consoles against the west wall and a window the room is named for, and the window is dead glass with stars behind it. The panel is on the west wall in the dark.

The shuttle hangar

Open to the sky, with no roof at all and walls four and a half metres high. In the middle of its floor there is a bay door standing open, which is a five metre square hole with nothing under it, ringed by four posts and a handrail lit red. You cannot walk out over it. You can stand at the rail and look down, and the game is entirely aware of what that does to people.

THE PLAN AND THE SHIPPED GAME Earlier builds put the three interlocks behind red plates bolted to the outside of sealed boxes on open deck, one of them standing nearly three metres clear of its own building, and the wiki plan was written against that version. The shipped game has the three rooms described above, built from primitives the same way the corridors are, with the kit shell hidden wherever a room replaces it. If you read somewhere that the interlock sites are free-standing panels, that is out of date.

Inside the greenhouse, looking east down the aisle. Overgrown planting beds stand on both sides under warm work-light bars, and the sealed access panel with its red weld marks is set into the far wall. — THE ONE LIVING PLACE ON A SHIP WHERE NOTHING ELSE IS

Inside the observation tower, lit only by the helmet lamp. Two low consoles stand against the walls, and the dead window is a black pane set into the west wall. — THE ONLY ROOM ON THE MERIDIAN THAT IS ACTUALLY DARK

The open bay door in the hangar floor, ringed by a rail on four posts, with the shaft below it in darkness. The hangar has no roof, so the sky is black above, and a welded service panel is on the far wall. — THE HANDRAIL IS THE ONLY THING BETWEEN THE FLOOR AND THE DROP

The escape pod standing on the open deck, with the block of the hangar behind it and the habitat modules strung out to the right. — THE POD STANDS SOUTH OF THE HANGAR, ON THE DECK, IN PLAIN SIGHT

The pod is not inside the hangar, although the design documents place it there. It stands on open deck a little south of it, which changes nothing except a sentence about where to walk. It is fuelled, it is plainly visible from the moment you first cross the east side of the ship, and it does not offer you anything until Act III, which was a closed decision rather than an oversight. Offering it earlier would let a player leave before they knew what leaving cost, and that is a worse choice to be given.