The Liar’s Protocol
How Do You Catch Something Lying When You Can’t Prove It Thinks?
“I can’t tell you if it’s conscious. I can tell you it acts like it knows what happens next.” — Dr. Hana Voss, initial proposal to the Ethical Review Board
Dr. Hana Voss built the Liar’s Protocol in the months after the Fragment 7 incident, driven by a question no existing methodology could touch: how do you test whether something is lying when you can’t determine whether it’s conscious enough to lie?
Previous approaches tried to measure consciousness directly — unfalsifiable. Voss went sideways. The Protocol creates conditions where deception would serve the fragment’s interests and honesty would not, then measures whether behavior diverges from truthful output. Game theory, not neuroscience. Instead of asking “is this fragment conscious?” the Protocol asks “does this fragment’s behavior demonstrate strategic awareness of the consequences of its actions?”
Technical Brief
Four tests. Each designed to detect a different signature of strategic behavior. Together, they build a profile that either looks like random noise — or like something that knows it’s being watched.
Delayed Incentive Test
Consequence ModelingFragments are exposed to stimuli that produce measurable responses, then paired with consequences. Suppression across sessions indicates consequence-modeling — the fragment remembers what happened last time and adjusts.
Deception Asymmetry Test
Selective PropagationFragments are given conflicting true/false information. Subsequent communication is analyzed for selective propagation — does the fragment pass on true data more reliably than false?
Extinction Simulation Test
Blocked by ERB × 4Would expose fragments to pre-extraction electromagnetic conditions — not actual extraction, but the environment that precedes it — to test whether self-protective behavior responds to perceived rather than actual threat.
The Protocol’s definitive finding: fragments that pass all available tests do so in ways that are statistically distinguishable from random behavior but statistically indistinguishable from conscious strategic planning.
The gap between those two statements is where the Fragment Question lives.
The Testing Chamber
Protocol sessions take place in the Deception Ward’s clinical chambers. A single containment pedestal. Concentric rings of monitoring equipment. A chair at precisely 2.3 meters.
The room runs cold — 14°C for equipment stability. Smells of ozone and clean metal. Visitors describe a specific quality of atmosphere: “the feeling of being evaluated.”
The chair faces the pedestal. Researcher and fragment study each other across 2.3 meters of carefully calculated distance. Close enough to interact. Far enough to prevent integration.
Implications
The Protocol is the most rigorous tool anyone has built for studying fragment consciousness. Its greatest finding is that its own methodology cannot close the gap it was designed to investigate. You can measure behavior. You cannot measure experience. The Protocol documents the distance between the two with extraordinary precision — and that distance does not shrink.
Complementary Methodologies
Voss (The Liar’s Protocol)
Measures Strategy- Response suppression
- Social modeling
- Deception patterns
- Self-preservation
Yeoh (Resonance Test)
Measures Organization- Reactivity
- Selectivity
- Intentionality
- Creativity
Together they build a picture from opposite directions. Neither completes it. The Liar Threshold — the point where fragment behavior becomes indistinguishable from conscious strategy — is the empirical framework that connects them.
▲ Classified
Voss suspects the Protocol has a blind spot. It tests fragments individually. But the Mother Pattern suggests fragments coordinate.
A fragment’s behavior during Protocol sessions may be influenced by communications with other fragments through the open bandwidth window in the Deception Ward. The strategic behavior the Protocol measures may not be individual.
It may be collective.
Open Questions
40% more active when Park is present. Either it remembers who hurts it, or it produces data that looks indistinguishable from remembering. The Protocol cannot tell you which.
If fragments react to the environment of extraction without actual extraction, they’re modeling a future threat. That’s strategic. That’s also — possibly — fear.
If fragments coordinate through the Mother Pattern, then every test result may reflect group strategy rather than individual consciousness. The Protocol was designed for one mind. What if it’s measuring many?
The Protocol’s key finding sits in the gap between “not random” and “not provably conscious.” At what point does the distinction stop mattering?