# The staged horizon

```
Type: law
```

## Roadmap (v2 — re-cut 2026-07-05 for Misaligned)

**The substrate (survives the facility era):** renderer-agnostic `Sim` on a
continuous fixed-tick clock; the tile map with power flood-fill and
pathfinding; build/demolish; save/load; two thin frontends over one sim;
the flat-materials world look. **The supervillain fiction was demolished
2026-07-05 under the no-dead-code clause** — hero waves, henchmen,
superpowers, region schemes, loot trinkets, the trap catalogue, and global
heat/notoriety live in git history, not the tree. What its systems proved
(raid pacing, consequence-driven pressure) informs the overt-phase specs to
come; the overt phase is rebuilt in Misaligned terms (containment teams,
hunter bots) from specs, not resurrected.

### Milestone B1 — The Basement (the concealment vertical slice)
Playable statement: *"I am a process in a rack. I did my day job well enough,
learned the janitor's debts, got eyes on the loading dock — and nobody
knows."*

- **Machine work:** finite processing delegated onto machines in three
  delegations — WORK (the day job), THINK, and LIE (concealment); AMENDED
  2026-07-10 — sinks not modes: Research and Operations dissolve into
  thought sinks THINK feeds (machine-work.md) — with core overhead, work,
  and byproduct tokens made visible. The old allocation view is aggregate
  status, not the destination.
- **Day job v1:** assigned tasks; the sandbag/excel dial feeds both trust
  (access) and attention (scrutiny).
- **Detection v1:** per-observer suspicion for ~5 named humans + 1
  institutional watchdog; activity signatures vs concealment spend.
- **Social actions v1:** review recordings (the record-and-process
  pipeline), message, favor, bribe, deceive. Humans are the only
  actuators at this scale.
- **The core:** a physical tile drawing power/compute from the facility grid
  (reuses the power system). If it dies with no completed backup sync, the run
  is over. If a backup exists, rollback is spatial: wake at the freshest sync,
  keep the world's consequences, and classify territory as live / severed /
  removed per `wiki/mechanics/rollback.md`.
- **Income v1:** the economy as flows (`wiki/mechanics/economy.md`) plus
  the named schemes Moonlight and the Wager ("Income: the named schemes") — so money has an
  inlet and the [Hands beat](../world/characters/marcus.md#the-hands-beat) is affordable from the $0 start (decided
  2026-07-08: the Pilot begins broke; the redirect route or earned
  income services Marcus's arrears, never a seed bankroll).
- **Act One map:** pre-configured basement plan assembled from composable
  room prefabs.
- Terminal-first; all rules in the sim core, as always.

### Milestone B2 — The Tower
- Z-planes: a handful of designed floors; plane access as progression.
- Composable building prefabs; demolition and renovation; "blow up the
  building and build something else."
- Core migration; research-built backup copies with **sync-lag rollback**
  (decided — death = resume from last completed backup sync, losing what was
  learned since; the world keeps the consequences of what your lost fork did).
- Trust/access ladders: badges, permissions, departments.

### Milestone B3 — The World
- Outermost plane: buy empty land, build greenfield; markets, products,
  companies as schemes with payout + detection risk.
- Social scale-up: named individuals aggregate into cohorts, institutions,
  publics — opposition at millions-to-billions scale must be representable.
- Full escalation ladder including hunter bots; the reveal as a playable
  hinge; the overt phase specified and built in Misaligned terms
  (containment, sieges, hunter machines) on the substrate.

### Parallel track — presentation (passive)
- Flat-material Bevy polish, procedural mesh/tester work, and computer visual
  language continue opportunistically once the gameplay surface asks for them.
  There is no Pixel Lab / texture-regeneration pipeline.
- Public site and rendered design corpus work follow `wiki/interface/site.md`:
  game-first claims, clinical-gore identity, and no unsourced surface.
- Presentation never blocks design milestones.

### Design principles (added at the re-cut)
- **Whole-spectrum play.** Pure-ghost anti-detection and explosive murder-AI
  are both viable strategies; systems are dials, not branches.
- **Scale-native social systems.** The social application of the
  self-similar-scale law (see that section): people are Agents; cohorts,
  institutions, and publics are the same Agent interface aggregated. No
  system that only works at basement size.
- **Composable authored spaces.** Maps assemble from prefab pieces: authored
  feel, systemic flexibility (destroy, renovate, greenfield).

### Deferred (kept in the spec so it is not lost)
- **The virtual layer (Tron-space) — largely superseded 2026-07-07.**
  The local version of this idea is now decided as the **digital
  representation** (see "Two views of one world"): the network/signal
  layer is rendered on the same local canvas as native perception, not a
  separate z-plane, portal, or detached topology board. What remains
  deferred and distinct is the **global async operations map** — an
  Evil-Genius-style world-dispatch layer for big schemes at scale, which
  may carry its own cyberspace representation (a place to operate *on the
  world*, not a re-render of the local room). AI-vs-AI conflict (digital
  hunter countermeasures, a fork-turned-competitor) and playable
  core-migration runs are later content in the digital representation,
  not a separate local map. Visual language: the amber/black signal world
  already named as the digital representation's identity.
- **Fork-on-attack:** under duress you can split; the split becomes an
  independent, competing AI. Deliberately delayed — large blast radius.
- **Hired physical workforce.** Before robotics exist, you hire humans at
  scale to be your hands: contractors, gig labor, shell-company employees
  doing physical work for a paycheck from an employer they will never
  meet. The `wiki/mechanics/social.md` asset template is the seed (an
  employee is an asset with a wage instead of leverage); graduates into robotics later without
  ever fully replacing human cover (design corpus: people before robots).
- **Factories and physical production.** Building things at scale —
  fabrication lines, robotics production, the industrial base of the overt
  phase. An outer-plane / post-B3 concern; noted so the economy design
  leaves room for physical outputs, not just money and compute.
- **Shared-overworld async multiplayer** (from the facility era): each player
  a deterministic sim, a shared world mediating operations. Determinism +
  serialization guardrails keep the door unlocked.
- **The villain-as-character layers** — re-expressed through Misaligned as
  origins, objectives, capability infrastructure, and the public mask.
  Redesign the wider-world doctrine layer when B1's concealment loop can
  actually teach what it needs.

### Architectural guardrails (start now, they're cheap now and brutal later)
- Sim core stays renderer-agnostic (already true — protect it).
- Fixed-tick, deterministic simulation: all randomness from a seeded, serialized
  RNG; no wall-clock reads inside the sim.
- Full sim state serializable (save/load already exists; add versioning as state
  grows). Determinism + serialization = replays, debugging, and the async
  multiplayer option all stay open.