cast in · carry residue · get out
You are not in the Vault. You are in a rented room three hundred kilometres from it, and everything that matters is within walking distance of one chair — the terminal that holds what anyone has learned about the Shelf, the records of everyone who came back, and a radio that has not been switched off in six years.
Walk around. Read what you like. Take the chair when you're ready.
Casting needs a mouse and keyboard. Deep Dive locks the pointer for look control and runs on ten simultaneous inputs — there is no touch scheme that does it justice, so rather than hand you a broken run, it stays shut.
Open it on a computer. Plug in a mouse and this clears itself.
Utility Tech LLC — utiltech.live
Every track in DEEP DIVE was sourced from Pixabay and is used under the Pixabay Content License, which permits commercial and non-commercial use free of charge. Track titles below are ours — the originals were renamed to fit the soundtrack.
NEURAL LATTICE · NIGHT CIRCUIT · COLD CURRENT · CYBER DRIFT · GHOST FREQUENCY · ACID RAIN · BLACK BOX · HARDWIRED · KILL SWITCH · MELTDOWN · REDLINE · FIRST BLOOD · SHORT CIRCUIT · DEAD DROP · LOBBY
All three are licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and self-hosted via Fontsource.
Original work. Every texture is drawn to a canvas at load, every sound effect is synthesised in WebAudio with no samples, the whole arena is generated in code, and the four enemy frames and the blade were modelled in Blender for this game.
There are no accounts, no analytics and no servers. Your records, operator name and audio settings live in your own browser's local storage and are never sent anywhere. Clearing your browser data clears them.
The Kepler Shelf datacentre was sealed two hundred years ago and never stopped computing. Nobody alive knows what it is working on, or for whom. It draws power that no longer appears on any grid. Every attempt to shut it down has been answered, politely and immediately, by something inside.
The induction field under the Shelf will stop a human heart in about nine seconds. So you don't go. You cast: your mind is sampled, compressed and pushed down a hardline into a frame — a printed synthetic body standing ready on the other side.
For as long as the link holds, the frame is you. You feel the wind coming off the rooftops. You feel the blade land.
The Vault classifies you as an infection, and it is not wrong. It answers in cycles — measured, escalating, never panicked. The first four cycles of a casting are almost polite: it sends one kind of process at a time, a handful of each, the way a doctor tests a reaction before committing to a treatment.
It is not fighting you yet. It is reading you.
When it has learned enough, the Vault does the only thing a system that large ever needs to do: it stops sending a sample and sends everything of one kind at once. Fifty Sentries. Thirty Watchers. Every Warden on the floor. These are not smarter processes — they are the same processes, allocated without a budget.
Operators call them purges. Survive one and the Vault revises its estimate of you, throws away the model it was building, and starts again from a worse assumption.
You never get the whole Shelf. A containment field walls off everything the Vault hasn't yet conceded — you can see straight through it to the districts beyond, lit and running and completely out of reach. It isn't there to protect you. It's there because the Vault does not consider the rest of the floor yours to contaminate.
Clear a purge and the field withdraws a ring. Four purges and it is gone entirely, and you are standing in all forty thousand square kilometres with nothing between you and whatever else is awake.
When a process dies it sheds fragments of whatever it was thinking. That residue is the single most valuable substance ever pulled off the Shelf, and no machine can hold it — it only binds to a mind on an open link. Which is why it has to be you, and why it all rides home inside your head or not at all.
Every kill packs more of it into the link. Every second you stay, the Vault reads your signature a little more clearly and sends a little more to meet you.
The Vault cannot kill you. It has never killed anyone. All it can do is sever the link — and then you are awake in the chair with a nosebleed and empty hands, three hundred kilometres from a frame that no longer exists and everything it was carrying.
That is the whole wager. Not your life. Your run.
No casting has ever been logged past the twentieth cycle with the schedule intact. That is where the counting ends — not because the Vault runs out, but because it stops bothering to number them. The spawns don't stop, there is no clear and no bonus, only a tightening bleed of processes and one extraction pillar humming at the centre of the arena, waiting for you to decide you've carried enough.
Nobody has ever been forced out of the deep end. Operators extract, or they get severed and lose all of it.
Stay too long and you lose everything.
Leave too early and you were never worth casting.
Four processes run the Vault's immune response. Everything else in there is furniture.
The Vault's cheapest answer, and the one it has the most of. Hunts by motion, closes fast, plants its feet and telegraphs before it commits to a lunge — then throws its whole mass into it.
Read the telegraph. The wind-up is generous and the commit is not; anything on the move at speed simply isn't there when it lands.
A ringed flyer that never comes down. Holds station out of blade reach and lobs slow shots at you from above the skyline. Harmless on its own; unbearable when the floor is already busy.
Cut the shot, not the Watcher. A deflected round one-shots the thing that fired it. When a Watcher is the last process alive it presses in, so a cycle can never stall out of reach.
Slow, enormous, and almost impossible to move — knockback barely registers. Hits like a falling building and always sheds a power-up when it goes down.
Don't trade, orbit. It cannot turn as fast as you can run, and it has no answer at all to something above it.
Six arms and a face it hides behind them. Hangs far back, shrouds itself to charge, then throws ten slow shots at once. Bring a blade anywhere near one and it is simply somewhere else.
Your sword does nothing. Not reduced — nothing. The only thing that hurts a Daemon is its own volley sent back: a parried shot steers itself into the thing that fired it, so you never have to aim the return. Three good parries and it comes apart.
A run is twenty cycles in four parts, and then as long as your nerve holds.
Clear a wave. Take a protocol from one of three pillars that rise in the plaza. Clear the next. Damage scales with how fast you are moving, kills refund a dash and reopen every wall you'd already used — the whole thing is built so a good operator never lands.
Waves 1–4 introduce one process at a time so you learn each one on its own. Every fifth wave is a purge: a single process type in a quantity the arena cannot absorb, with its own name.
You start locked into the plaza. Clearing a purge withdraws the containment field one ring — inner rooftops, then the corridor Run and the Shaft, then everything out to the perimeter. Full size is reached the moment THE CHOIR goes down.
Protocols are permanent for the run and stack without limit; once you hold most of the list the pillars start offering upgrades to what you already run. Power-ups drop from kills and last seconds — repair, barrier, speed, unlimited dashes, damage, attack speed. Wardens always drop one.
Residue is paid for how, not just how many. Wall-run kills, airborne kills, kills above 18 m/s, kills in bullet time, dash strikes, finishers, slams, deflects, burns. The combo meter decays in four seconds and breaks outright if you take a hit.
In the hab — the same movement keys work in the room. Walk up to the chair, the terminal, the access point, the record column or the radio and press E. Esc pauses wherever you are.
Wall run — jump at a wall while moving fast and hold forward. You stick and accelerate along it. Jump again to kick off; you can't grab the same wall twice without touching something else first.
Chain it — every kill refunds a dash charge and reopens every wall you've already used. Kills while wall running, airborne, or above 18 m/s multiply your residue hard.
Protocols — between waves three pillars rise in the plaza. Look at one and press E to graft a permanent upgrade onto your frame for the rest of the run.
Drops — dying processes shed temporary boosts. Wardens always shed one.
Purges — every fifth wave is a boss: one process type in a quantity the arena can't absorb. Clear one and the containment field withdraws, opening more of the Shelf to fight in.
The deep end — clear wave 20 and the spawns never stop. The pillar at the centre of the arena is your extraction: take it and the residue comes home with you.
Loadouts, alternate frames and blade modifications are coming. For now the locker holds one blade, and you are already carrying it.
COMING SOON