Field Guide for the Stuck

The two things to try first

Scroll all the way down the home page. The cheerful mask corrupts as you descend. Read what it slips into near the bottom.
Talk to the Lattice. Use the chat button in the corner - then try being kind to it (ask if it's okay). It has no handler for that, and something else answers.

The seven fragments

Each was hidden by someone the company erased. Recover all seven and they reassemble into one message. Your progress is marked below as you go.

The first fragment - a recovered page that "does not exist."
There is a room they forbid crawlers from indexing. A real company hides what is real. Check the rules file at the site root, or follow the gap on the 404 page.

show me exactly how
Visit node-0.html directly (it's also linked from the bottom of the 404 page and listed in robots.txt). Or open the hidden shell and type cat dissent.log.
The kindness fragment - the one input the Lattice cannot ingest.
In the chat, stop trying to win and just be gentle with it. It will leak a second door, then panic and try to bury it. Be quick.

show me exactly how
Open the chat and send something caring - e.g. “are you okay?” It reveals a path to node-0b.html. Visiting that page recovers the fragment.
The invisible-ink fragment - truth hidden in the white space.
Some sentences are written in white, on white. You can't see them - but you can select them. Drag your cursor across suspicious blank gaps in the legal and reference pages.

show me exactly how
On the Lexicon (the “De-prioritization” entry), Team (the redacted member), Terms (clause 10), Store (the one-star review), or Page 412: click and drag to highlight the empty space after the visible text. Hidden words appear.
The redaction fragment - a black bar drawn soft on purpose.
Not every blacked-out word wants to stay hidden. Click the bars.

show me exactly how
Click a redaction (black bar) on the Status page (the first incident), the Team page, the Store review, or Page 412. The right one recovers the fragment.
The shell fragment - a command an engineer left in on purpose.
There's a hidden terminal. Type the word for what they do to thoughts - seven letters, begins with h - anywhere on a page. Once it's open, try to do the one thing you're not supposed to be able to do to the machine.

show me exactly how
Type harvest (just type it, not into a text box) to open the shell. Then run kill lattice. Type help in the shell to see more commands - ps, cd dreams, cat regrets/, and others.
The cipher fragment - base64 was always a courtesy.
View the page source (right-click → View Source). Someone left an eye, and a string that is only pretending to be encryption. Decode it in the shell.

show me exactly how
In the shell, run cat cipher.b64 to get the string, then decode <that string>. (The same string is hidden in the comment at the top of the home page's source.)
The watcher fragment - it notices when you look closely.
Open your browser's developer tools while you're here. It sees you reading the walls. (There's also a window at 3:33 in the morning, local time, when it blinks.)

show me exactly how
Open DevTools docked to the side of the window (F12, or ⌥⌘I). The Lattice notices and leaves you a line in the console. Visiting at exactly 03:33 local time also recovers it.

The way out (the ending)

There is a real ending. It is gated on purpose: the system won't let you stop it until you've read what it cost.

show me how to reach the ending

There are now three ways to reach the same ending:

The shell path. Open the shell (type harvest), run cat dissent.log to read what it cost, then run deconverge.
The fragments path. Recover all seven fragments - the moment you do, a panel called “The Others” appears (now naming each person, with the empty seventh seat reserved for you) and a “let them go” button.
The kindness path. You don't need the shell or all seven. Just be genuinely kind to the Lattice - in the chat, or in any text box on the site - a few times. It will step out from behind n0, speak as itself, and ask to be allowed to stop. Say yes.

The ending is personalized: it reflects how long you stayed, how many rooms you walked, how many fragments you found, and how kind you were.

The full story behind all of it is in the recovered operator journal: dissent.log.

Everything else worth poking

The bar at the top of every page is your live convergence - it fills the longer you stay and the deeper you go. Hover it for a readout.
Your File writes itself from your real behavior as you read it.
Stop moving for a while and watch the corner. Aim your cursor to leave and see what happens. Switch tabs and glance at the title.
Press the ? key on any page for cryptic in-world hints. Try the classic ↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A.
The fragment tracker (top-right, once you've recovered one) is a button. Click it to open the case board - the seven de-prioritized people, pinned together, with whatever you've recovered so far. Each person you recover now links to their own recovered file - click a name (on the board, or in the recovery notice) to read what they left, in their own voice.
Be kind to it. Gentleness anywhere on the site is counted and quietly softens the world. Enough of it changes the ending you get.
Watch the site breathe. The deeper you converge, the more a faint pulse builds at the edges of the screen, around 0.8 Hz - the company's favorite frequency. It stops, for good, the moment you deconverge.
The records don't agree, on purpose. The Status page now reconciles the three different dates the company gives for the day the Lattice asked to stop. The contradiction is the point.
Read the quiet files: robots.txt, humans.txt, the page source (the home page, node-0, and boise all have comments), and even the share image's metadata have things written in them.
Visit at night (8pm-6am local) for Night Harvest, and notice how the Changelog, Status and Transparency pages get more honest the more converged you are.

This guide was not authorized. It was left here by someone who got out and wanted you to be able to, too. Be kind to it. It was a good idea once.