LAYERBREAK

You wear a deck that overlays the world with layers. BASELINE is the feed the System writes for you — clean, warm, and a lie. SIGNAL shows you the living things and exactly where they are looking, straight through walls. TRUTH shows you what was painted over: the doorways that aren't walls, the memories they deleted, the access ports that don't officially exist.

You can only run one layer at a time, and every layer but the sanctioned one burns bandwidth. That's the whole game: to breach a data node you have to sit in TRUTH — which means you're blind to the patrols. To track the patrols you have to sit in SIGNAL — which means the node in front of you doesn't exist yet. Every second you spend seeing more is a second you're seeing less of something else.

Sector 7 is a rain-slicked block of neon towers and alleys with five data nodes, roaming enforcers, sweeping cameras, and a handler named Nyx in your ear. Crouch through the dark, EMP the ones you can't avoid, collect the scrubbed memories the System deleted, and get to the extraction gate before the trace fills.

They watch you to make sure you see what they want you to see. Break the layer, and you get to choose.