Signal Rot

You are the night camera operator, and the rule is one sentence long: the thing moving through the facility steers away from whichever camera you are currently watching.

It is not psychic. Every room carries a heat number you control by looking at it, and that number is a cost in the creature's pathing. So watching a feed is not surveillance — it is a wall you build by paying attention, and it decays the moment you look somewhere else. Check the same three feeds all night and it will simply route through the other six. Your only offensive verb is LOG: catch it on screen and press it, and the door ahead of it seals. Do that often enough to reach 06:00.

How it plays

• Viewing a camera adds 1.0 heat per second and it decays at 0.25/s, capped at 3.0. That heat multiplies into the creature's route cost by 4.0 before midnight and 6.0 after. Offered one hot room and one cold one, it takes the cold one in over 90% of 600 trials — measured, not asserted.
• Power is 100 units. A live feed drains 0.6/s, the terminal map drains 1.2/s, a manual seal costs 5, and standby regenerates 0.35/s. Equilibrium is 36.8% of the night with a picture up — the rest is you sitting in the dark, deciding it is not worth looking yet.
• A log only counts while the creature is actually in the room on screen and not in transit between rooms. It seals that door for 45 seconds and prints a line to the terminal. A rejected log still costs you the keystroke.
• Reaching your desk is a 20 second countdown, not an instant loss. A log landed inside that window evicts it and seals the room behind it. The breach itself costs 10 power whether or not you survive it, so surviving one is strictly worse than never having one.
• The night runs a fixed table across 13.5 minutes of real time, 22:00 to 06:00. One creature at 22:00; faster and hungrier after midnight; a second one wakes at 03:00; the strongest pull toward your desk in the final hour.
• Each seed builds nine rooms with 10 to 12 doors, a control room with exactly two entrances, and per-room static between 0.10 and 0.60 — noisy cameras are genuinely harder to read. A seed a do-nothing player would not die on in 8 to 20 minutes is rejected before you ever see it.

Across 24 simulated nights, varying your scan returned 1.6× the sightings and fewer breaches than watching the same three feeds — 19.1 against 12.0, and 8.9 against 11.1. Both strategies survived the same number of nights, so the pattern changes how much you see and score, not whether you live.

Everything is a monitor: green phosphor, scanlines, barrel distortion, and a 0.15 second roll-and-sync glitch every time you change feed. Amber is spent on seals and warnings and nothing else. The creature is never a drawn shape — it is a hole cut in the phosphor, which is why deciding you saw it is a decision and not a reflex.