An excerpt from Making Meridian: A complete account of the history of West Faraday’s most storied city, a text used in a general education role in schools through much of both Primary and Meridian.

TRANSCRIPT BEGINS

Chapter 4: Stitching shut the Suture: How Primary and Meridian first made contact in the Isolation Era and the sociological, economic, and personal effects thereof.

AFTER the third civil conflict in Meridian - the Labor Wars, as discussed in the previous chapter - the city was on uneasy footing yet again, as it often had been in it’s short life. The new City Charter, Mason Slater, was an ineffectual leader, often too willing to cede power to one of the orginizations that had given them the role in the first place, causing each of Meridian’s founding orginizations to slowly grow in power and starting a race to undermine each other that would last for the next thirty years. As the founding orginizations fought for power, many of the city’s normal citizenry would turn to the smaller, local organizations near them for support, creating a city fractured down so many faction lines that it was nearly impossible for the city to continue functioning on it’s own. Agricultural production slowed as irrigation infrastructure from the [nearby river] began to slowly deteriorate, intra-city transport dissolved, many of the new plumbing systems in the city were not maintained, and many accounts agree that there was a general sense of ‘lawlessness’ in the city, although other accounts cite that this was not simple ‘lawlessness’, but a collectivism born out of citizen’s desperation that found people working together to acquire the food and resources they needed out of the hands of the orginizaitons that held them. The Charter, oblivious to what was happening in his own city, did nearly nothing to stop it, and as long as the founding orginizations continued gaining the Charter’s support to pursue their own projects [see insert: The Construction of the First House of the House of the Twin Suns], the city’s slow collapse could not be further out of their minds.

Amidst this chaos, a collective idea began to be born: surely Meridian was not the only city on the continent. Stories were prevalent about Meridian’s Twin, a second city that lay on the other side of the suture that was originally part of Meridian itself. The promised resources of trade with another city was an alluring concept to many (lumber shortages were common, and while many farmers were attempting to continue expanding their farms east, this brought with it an unpredictable level of danger), especially as a long, warm summer promised to fade into a harsh winter. Just as promising as the idea of shared resources, however, was the dream of the city: the people of Meridian only knew the world past the Haze as a dangerous, precarious place, it was this fact that their leaders had used against them in the First Uprising to quell early revolts and keep revolutionaries confined to the city for the duration of the conflict. Were something to be found outside of Meridian’s borders, the people would have a greater bargaining chip, and possibly a greater power in future conflicts with the aid of other survivors of the Resonance. Most importantly, many texts of the time cite that the most important reason for finding Meridian’s Twin was to provide the people of the slowly collapsing city with hope.

As the push to explore past the Fresnel Zone that surrounded Meridian became more mainstream, and became a common anxiety in the city, the founding orginizations moved to snap up their own role in this venture. The House, whose extra-spatial transport safety methods had already proved successful in the earliest days of Meridian’s founding, framed themselves as the protectors of these travelers, and ‘blessed’ the citywide search for the rest of the world, even as they refused to send members of the House along with expeditionary groups as protection. Breakwater began a long sequence of rebranding as they did begin to accompany explorers, though these expeditions often had catastrophic results and a later rebranding campaign at the end of the Isolation Era by the orginization worked to erase them from the record entirely. Lion’s Mane, perhaps unpopularly, pushed for people staying in the city, beginning a propaganda campaign that advertised that with their help, and with the contribution of the city’s people, the city would be back on it’s feet in no time (notably, all of the programs Lion’s Mane promised to put in place were never executed and remain empty promises). While MTIPD’s transformation to a cross-Suture transport company would come years later, after the connection with Primary was well established, they still publicly supported a number of larger and better known expeditions, essentially using them as advertising and hoping to carry their successes to a bid for even more power and funding.

Trust in these orginizations, however, had rapidly dropped through the course of the Labor Wars and the years after, and only the most desperate expeditionary groups (or, by many accounts, the ones most hungry for fame and not to truly find Meridian’s Twin) accepted the offers the founding orginizations put forth. The most notable groups were composed of those who had already spent extensive time outside of the Fresnel Zone; fringe groups that explored outside of the city in the hopes of finding Pre-Resonance ruins rich with technology or resources. While Meridian scientists hold that the Suture is a significantly more dangerous environment to traverse than most Mar-rich areas (especially those within 50 miles of the edge of a Fresnel Zone), these travelers had the right techniques and equipment to begin their journeys safely, and made much more progress than the unequipped and unprepared. Unfortunately, first hand accounts also cite many of these people as difficult to work with: many were simply old and set in their ways, while others, due to overexposure to the Mar, were only half in this world at any given time, and spent much of their time talking to ghosts or expedition members from sister universes or alternate timelines.

However, it would be an unlikely figure that rose to prominence during the search for Meridian’s Twin: a young woman by the name of Julian Ingram. Ingram was the eldest daughter in a family of farmers, and had spent much of her young adulthood pushing at the barrier of the Fresnel Zone in order to find more safe ground for her family to expand their farm as the burgeoning city required more and more food. One common folktale says that Ingram, at the age of 20, left the Fresnel Zone entirely while chasing an escaped pig, accompanied only by her herding dog. She navigated the Mar successfully using only a compass, her own instincts, and the instincts of the dog traveling with her, and returned safely to her farmhouse by nightfall, the disobedient pig in tow: a feat nearly unheard of given the unpredictability of the Mar in the first hundred years after the Resonance. It is with this attitude that Ingram began her expeditions into the Suture, hoping to find Meridian’s lost twin. The following is an excerpt from Ingram’s personal diary (note to follow):

I’m always going into the Haze looking for something. Least, that’s what I’ve told myself for years and years, every time I walk right up to it and look it in the eye. Looking for something. More ground to plant in, to graze our sheep. It doesn’t take more than one single trip into that place to know you’re not gonna find the kind of ground you can till. It doesn’t want you to. So, I don’t know. Maybe I’m not looking for anything in there. Or at least, not anything I can find. I’m just looking.

Now people are talking about going east. Finding the other half of our great city. I’d say, if it’s anything like the half a city we’ve got, leave it out there to rot, but my grandma has these stories she’s always telling me. Days before the Resonance and all that. She says she remembers the other half of this city, that she saw it. She says that she has a little sister that must be there, who was on that side of the city when it split. She keeps telling me about her sister. I can’t stop thinking of it, you know? You know how it is, when something gets stuck in your head like this.

I have to find her sister. I have to. Or at least, to try. So I’m going east. People keep dying out there, I know that, but I know it’s different when you walk into the Haze and you’re looking for something. Like it can tell. Maybe that means it’ll snap me up quicker, I don’t know. I hope not.

Told my family I’m going into the city with a friend to get some of their farm equipment repaired. They don’t need to know any better. Leaving tomorrow.

Note: The veracity of the claim that this journal was the real journal of Julian Ingram is often doubted in academic circles, as it was found in the Suture many years later and could just as easily be a fake as it could be a copy of the journal from an alternate universe. However, until the debate on the journal’s trustworthiness comes to a close, it is the only primary source of Ingram’s that is readily available (notably, one of the few surviving primary sources from the Isolation Era at all) and the authors of this text believe it to be true for this purpose.

Notes on Ingram’s journey past it’s start do not exist, either in her own journal or from the accounts of others, as she traveled into the Suture alone, it was her journey across the Suture that was successful, her that made the first contact with Primary. Most illustrations of this contact show her meeting a fellow explorer who was leaving Primary to find Meridian somewhere in the desolate landscape of the Suture (see Fig 4.12), with two singular explorers meeting on equal ground, but based on accounts from Primary it is in fact much more likely that Ingram made it all the way to Primary alone, and entered the city by herself at the end of her journey.

Yet the image of two isolated travelers meeting in an impossible space persists: it is an impossibly alluring vision of the journeys of this time.

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Definitions:

City Charter: The ruling head of Meridian at the end of the Isolation Era, after the Labor Wars. The Charter was put into power by the heads of [name of the religion], Breakwater, and what would come to be known as Moraine Transportation, Infrastructure, and Protectionary Division in the coming years. While the Charter was written to have a decent amount of power in the city; including the ability to create infrastructural projects, implement laws and taxes, and oversee the groups that put them in power, they mostly served as a figurehead for the 75 years that they led the city, until they were replaced by Primary’s system of [idk primaries government system]. See Chapter 6.

Founding Orginizations: Also called the Founding Four, Meridian’s Origin, or the Throughline (though this name is more uncommon), this name refers to Tourmaline’s Heart, Breakwater (orignially called Breakwater Orginizational Impact Committe, now known as Breakwater Expeditionary Security Company), Moraine Transportation, Infrastructure, and Protectionary Division (originally known as Uptown Rail), and Lion’s Mane. Most scholars agree that Lion’s Mane is the oldest orginization in the city, even older than the House of the Twin Suns.

Meridian’s Twin: The mythological name for Primary, used before Primary’s discovery. Also called the Left Hand, the Second Half, the Split Circle, the Twin Heart, the Ventricle, Staple, the City of the Dead, the Lost City, or simply the Twin. The Haze: An archaic name for the edge of the Fresnel Zone. Many in this era colloquially referred to the area now known as the Fresnel Zone as ‘clear water’.

First Uprising: The first in a long line of civil conflicts in Meridian, starting 34PR and ending 36PR. The conflict was largely between the early leadership (mostly associated with the House of the Twin Suns) and a citizen’s rebellion with the goal of popular ownership of previously House-owned resources. See Chapter 1.