Project Loom

Overview

A codename found in twenty foundational documents at the heart of the Meridian Archive. Every other page in the twelve-thousand-page archive connects back to these twenty documents within three hops. Project Loom is the spine of the archive — the central thesis around which all evidence is organised.

Purpose

To map the environmental and financial connections between twelve contaminated aquifer sites in the valley and their corporate owners. The project traces a fifteen-year paper trail of:

• Environmental monitoring data — groundwater contamination levels at each site, tracked quarterly
• Corporate filings — SEC quarterly reports, subsidiary registrations, dissolved shell companies
• Health records — anonymised hospital admission data correlating with contamination spikes
• Satellite imagery — time-lapse analysis of waste disposal operations at six sites
• Internal memos — leaked documents from Meridian Holdings subsidiaries referencing “acceptable contamination thresholds”

The Ownership Chain

The twelve aquifer sites are operated by twelve different companies. On the surface, they appear unrelated. The Loom data reveals that all twelve are subsidiaries of subsidiaries of subsidiaries — shell companies nested three to five layers deep, all ultimately controlled by Meridian Holdings.

Three of these subsidiaries were dissolved six months before Elara discovered the archive — a possible sign that someone at Meridian knows the archive exists and is beginning to clean house.

The Twenty Foundational Pages

The core of Loom consists of twenty documents that function as an index:

1. Sites 1–12: One document per aquifer site, linking contamination data to corporate ownership
2. Financial Map: Three documents tracing the shell company structure
3. Timeline: Two documents establishing the fifteen-year chronology
4. Health Impact: Two documents correlating contamination with public health data
5. The Methodology: One document describing how the data was collected, verified, and cross-referenced

Connection to the Civic Data Initiative

Kai first heard the name “Loom” ten years ago, before the Civic Data Initiative was shut down. The CDI was a government-funded effort to centralise environmental and public health data. When it was defunded, its data scientists were offered severance contingent on NDAs.

Project Loom appears to be the work of someone who refused to let the data die when the initiative did.

Current Status

The archive is now distributed across the dead drop — seven nodes in seven jurisdictions. Ruth Gallegos at the EPA is positioned to verify the data against official records. If the evidence holds, it could trigger the largest environmental prosecution in the region’s history.

Referenced in The Archive, The Trace, The Dead Drop, and The Source.