THE HUNT (the deterministic rig repro made it a two-hour arc):
1. cdb write-watch armed from the Torso ctor (bp plants `ba w4 this+0x21c`
per torso -- ASLR-proof). The poison reproduced (atUpd=-1250 this run;
-3750 and int-15-as-float before)... and the watch stayed SILENT. Nobody
writes the garbage. The field is never INITIALIZED.
2. Confirmed in our ctor reconstruction: it inits every neighbour but skips
targetTwist @0x218 and twistAtUpdate @0x21C (the function that zeroes
them is a death-reset handler, not the ctor).
3. Confirmed in the BINARY: the real ctor @004b6b0c contains no store to
either offset -- a genuine 1995 latent bug (uninitialized read on the
copy path).
4. Why the pod never showed it: MemoryBlock arenas carve fresh OS-zeroed
pages, one pool per type, low churn -- first allocations read as zero.
The engine's own DEBUG_NEW_ON NaN-fill proves the developers knew the
hazard class. Why WE show it: mechrecon.hpp's Memory::Allocate shim
("a plain heap allocation is behaviour-equivalent" -- false) recycles
dirty heap. Replicant torsos spawned with garbage twist targets; the
limit clamp turned any garbage into FULL TWIST -- rendered "twisted full
right while not using TT" to every peer (playtest night 4, 3 reporters).
THE FIX -- environmental, class-wide, byte-faithful to the binary's code:
Memory::Allocate / AllocateArray / Alloc now ZERO-FILL, reproducing the pod's
EFFECTIVE allocation semantics for every never-stored field in every
reconstructed factory at once (Torso, Reservoir, all of them). No ctor gains
stores the binary lacks.
PROVEN on the rig: the replicant thor now spawns cur=0 target=0 atUpd=0
(was cur=-3.31613 = hard against the limit). Teardown clean.
Ships with part 1 (the dead-reckoning clock fix) in the next zip. Remaining
on #67 for the next games night: live confirmation that twist TRACKING looks
right in play, and whether the fire-from-centre facet (very plausibly the same
never-stored-field class, now zeroed) is cured with it.
Tools kept: scratchpad/torso_watch.cdb + rig_watch.ps1 (the ctor-armed
write-watch pattern -- reusable for any "who wrote this field" hunt).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
