You've been beamed into the game. Four processes sit in a row, face-down — unexecuted code. At level 1 you have no permissions: if any card flips face-up, its code executes, and you do not survive execution. No HP anywhere. Kills are schedules, not damage.
Three beats; the third is RED. On red, in order: maturing casts resolve left to right → all sideways cards straighten → your spent pile returns to hand. Red passes harmlessly over a clean board.
SCAN — edges of the living row only. Until you upgrade scan, you peel the onion: each kill moves the frontier inward. The card turns back over. A scan shows you a face until your next action and then it is gone — what you learn lives in your head, and re-scanning costs exactly one turn. That is the whole memory economy: the sharp player holds three identities and spends those turns on tempo; the tired player looks again. Both are playing legally.
HIBERNATE — instant, undetectable jam. Corrupted: when the jam ends at red, the target flips face-up. Every jam is a promise to kill. A jam is cover, not armor — it does not shield a card from chains or from hearing things.
BREACH — a cast. Alert tick on turn 2 flips the target unless it's sideways — the tick lands last each turn, so a jam played that same turn arrives in time. The kill only lands on red, and only if the cast is 3 turns old.
On red, kills resolve left to right, and hearing is checked at the moment of each death. A warden that dies at slot 2 before a kill resolves at slot 3 witnesses nothing — the row's resolution order determines who is alive to hear what. With one cast this is trivia; it becomes the game later.
CONDENSE +1♻ — when casting BREACH, allocate one other resident script beneath it (the allocation table is the tracking system). The condensed kill resolves on red at cast-age 2 instead of 3. At L1 this buys the mez-then-burn order: jam on 1, condensed cast on 2, stall on 3, harvest the same red. At L2 it buys off-beat tempo — a beat-2 cast that lands the same red. The payment gets deferred recovery: it frees only when the spell resolves, not at GC.
There is no pass; time is neutral and a free skip would be free power. But every script is dual-use: run it as its verb, or recycle it face-down as RAM. A recycle is always legal and costs you that verb until red — the taxed almost-pass. RAM buys nothing yet; the upgrade ladders come with later levels. STALL exists only when you have no scripts loaded at all.
A dive is bounded. You have twice as many cycles as there are processes — eight on dive 1, ten on dive 2, twelve on dive 3 — and when the trace completes you are found. Nothing flips; you are simply located. The budget is deliberately loose: one kill per cycle is the hard floor, so a clean clear uses exactly half of it. The trace is there to bound dithering, not to hurry you. It will tighten once killing can outrun one-per-cycle.
One legal kill line, nested in the bar: cast on beat 1 · jam on beat 2 · harvest on red. The tutorial teaches 3/4 time.
▚ MOB ×2 — inert. ◉ WARDEN — hears any death in an adjacent slot and flips. Kill order is everything. ⌁ TRIPWIRE — chains to all adjacents if it dies un-jammed; the weld jams it by construction.
Hibernate is repaired: it exits gracefully — when the jam ends at red, the card returns to face-down. Jams stop being promises. Off-beat casts become legal (cover the tick with next cycle's hibernate), scan-openings become survivable, and the bar un-forces. The counter arrives with it: ⊗ SHREDDER — at the end of every turn it straightens sideways cards in adjacent slots, before the tick lands. Nothing adjacent to a living shredder can hold cover, so it joins the warden in dictating kill order. It does not shred its own slot. The row grows to five.
Scan is repaired: it reaches any living slot. You no longer peel the onion from the edges — point at anything and read it. The information game opens all at once, and the counter arrives to price it: ⊙ SENTRY — it notices a SCAN of itself or of either neighbour and goes ALERTED (its card pushes forward out of the row). An alerted sentry flips face-up on red unless it is dead or sideways by then. It has no hearing and no shred; it answers only to being looked at.
So looking is no longer free near a sentry — but the cost is tempo, never luck. Cover is the answer: jam suppresses a card's own triggers, so a sentry jammed before you look notices nothing, and one jammed after loses the thread at red. One hibernate buys a whole cycle of free looking. Two consequences worth knowing before you dive: an alerted sentry cannot be killed in the cycle it wakes (alert, cast and cover is three cards and three beats, and the cast is only age 2 at red), and in the fixed dive the sentry sits beside the warden, so the warden must die first or the sentry's own death is heard. The row grows to six.
Later: silent/fast/permanent breach, MOVE, jam-as-shield, declared loadouts.