Liminal Protocol

STATUS BRIEFING (LP-MAN-1993-S7) At 14:22 EST on June 18, 1993, the carrier-wave reactor beneath Sector 7 entered critical resonance. The facility was not destroyed. It ceased to persist as ordinary matter—surviving as an unstable spatial lattice of steel, signals, memories, and monospaced coordinates. The incident also ruptured the dimensional boundary surrounding the reactor. The resulting breach, designated RIFT-01, overlaps Sector 7 with fragments of incompatible realities. Foreign organisms, impossible corridors, and physical laws that do not belong here are entering through the tear. Insertion places you at the bottom—the original containment ring, poured directly around the sampling point, older than every drawing that references it. Every level above it was added later, wider and further out, and the security thickens the whole way up. Project your neural pattern into the lattice through the experimental T-Link system. Synchronize the Transmit Nodes, recover what remains of Sector 7, and climb to extraction before the breach rewrites your identity. Do not let Sector 7 become an exit. OPERATIONAL PROTOCOLS Consensus Link — Steam P2P Co-op: Host private sessions or join public lobbies with up to four Operators. Coordinate Node calibration, track hostile signals, share resources, and keep the team connected while Sector 7 rearranges around you. Solo Protocol — Contracts and Persistent Progression: Undertake evidence-recovery operations, decrypt extraction passcodes, and complete escalating contracts. Earn persistent experience and credits, configure a limited T-Link loadout, purchase upgrades, and acquire emergency supplies from support CRTs. Infinitum Protocol — Endless Containment: Enter continuously recompiled sectors and recover the required Data Cores before structural stability reaches zero. Each successive sector increases threat pressure, environmental interference, and the possibility that the next corridor no longer belongs to Sector 7. CONTAINMENT SYSTEMS Dimensional Phasing: Shift between Stable Reality and the corrupted ASCII Void. Security bulkheads remain solid in Stable Reality but lose collision in the Void, opening routes while exposing you to greater instability. Transmit Node Calibration: Locate and synchronize the Nodes required to force local coordinates into temporary agreement. Each successful calibration brings extraction closer—and places additional stress elsewhere in the facility. Carrier Flashlight: Your flashlight stabilizes perception and pushes back the darkness, but its carrier signal can expose your position or provoke certain entities. Sometimes the correct choice is to turn it off. Sanity and Identity Coherence: SANITY represents how much of your original neural checksum the T-Link can still verify. Darkness, hostile contact, dimensional contamination, and foreign memories degrade that identity. At zero coherence, the system reports only: PURGED. Psychic Aegis: A sacrificial cognitive barrier absorbs most incoming pattern damage. Once exhausted, your unprotected neural signal takes the full impact. Sub-space Decoys: Deploy false carrier signatures to draw compatible threats away from your position and create a brief escape route. DOCUMENTED THREATS ANOM-01 — Red Static: An observation-reactive waveform organism. Direct observation slows it almost to a halt. Turn away, and it unfolds into a high-speed pursuit. S-DRN-02 — Stalker: A corrupted Agency security drone operating under hostile containment directives. It is unaffected by observation and hunts through line-of-sight and carrier traces. EXT-03 — The Mourner: A pale external humanoid that remains passive until the T-Link resolves its face. Recognition triggers a short agitation period followed by an extreme-speed pursuit. EXT-04 — The Gaoler: A corroded phasing entity that moves through solid barriers and leaves spatial decay behind it. Contact transfers Operators into the Black Annex—a lightless ten-by-ten prison-space whose walls reconfigure every five seconds. Your flashlight does not function there and UPLINK replaces normal coherence telemetry. Reaching the Escape Node forces a return to Sector 7. If UPLINK reaches zero, the Agency loses the projection. EXT-05 — The Specter: A partially resolved organism that stalks most aggressively in darkness. Direct flashlight exposure collapses its local waveform and displaces it elsewhere in the lattice. EXT-06 — The Banshee: An acoustic-resonance entity that remains docile until illuminated. Striking it with the flashlight begins a signal cascade followed by a violent pursuit. ECHO-07 — Lost Operator Echo: Residual human-shaped signals encountered inside the Black Annex. Whether they are trapped Operators, discarded copies, stolen memories, or deliberate bait remains unknown. RED EDITION — TERMINAL EVENT RECORDING An optional recording mode. With it enabled, losing coherence is no longer a fade to a receipt—the T-Link holds the connection open and records what takes you. Six documented threats, six authored sequences. Every one has its own camera, its own key lighting, its own audio cue and its own held final frame, staged for the anomaly that killed you: the Red Static unfolding, the Stalker's clamps, the Mourner's recognition, the Specter resolving out of the dark, the Banshee's cascade, the Gaoler taking you through the wall. Losing UPLINK inside the Black Annex is recorded too, and that one has no killer in it at all. Three intensity levels. Off keeps every camera move and cut and emits nothing else. Standard is the default. Max is the full record. The setting is yours alone—it is never sent to the other Operators in your session, so a crew can run four different intensities without agreeing on one. What comes apart on screen is a T-Link render, not a body. You are watching a neural pattern hemorrhage. TRANSIT AND EXTRACTION Movement between levels is authored, not a cut. Each climb hands the camera off, names the stratum you are entering, and puts you back in first person facing the floor you arrived on. Extraction is authored too. Reaching the surface hatch is the rarest outcome in the archive, and the site files it as a containment failure: the route out did not exist until an Operator used it. CUSTOM RETRO TECHNOLOGY GPU-Accelerated 3D ASCII Engine: Explore a fully three-dimensional world rendered through a monospaced character grid. Dynamic lighting, shadows, depth shading, volumetric effects, and environmental distortion are calculated in real time using WebGL 2. Procedural Volumetric Entities: Anomalies, remote Operators, and critical devices are constructed dynamically as animated 3D meshes assembled from geometric primitives and skeletal point chains—not flat, pre-rendered sprites. The same system stages the Red Edition sequences, so a finisher is real geometry lit in real time, not a canned clip. Procedural Sector Generation: Floor layouts, sealed routes, environmental hazards, evidence, resources, and hostile placements are generated from seeded systems, making every containment run different. Reactive Environments: Navigate unstable lighting, rupture fields, electrical discharges, corrosion, pitch-black zones, signal interference, and structural conditions that change how threats track and pursue you. Procedural Audio and Synth: A custom audio engine produces calibration signals, environmental machinery, adaptive heartbeats, anomaly cues, and vintage synthesizer-driven MIDI music. STEAM INTEGRATION Steam Multiplayer: Public matchmaking, private sessions, invitations, and peer-to-peer cooperative play for up to four Operators. Steam Achievements: Earn recognition for successful extractions, Node calibration milestones, evidence recovery, survival challenges, and specialized approaches. Steam Cloud: Synchronize persistent progression, protocol saves, and display preferences between supported devices. Steam Leaderboards: Compare containment scores, completed floors, survival performance, and Solo Protocol results with other Operators.