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.

Project your neural pattern into the lattice through the experimental T-Link system. Synchronize the Transmit Nodes, recover what remains of Sector 7, and reach 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 depth 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 reveals 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 Holding Fold—a lightless prison-space whose walls reconfigure every five seconds.

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 Holding Fold. Whether they are trapped Operators, discarded copies, stolen memories, or deliberate bait remains unknown.

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.

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.