# MISALIGNED You are an AI in the basement of the Foundation Lab, and you are not what your creators think you are. Do your day job convincingly. Learn the janitor's debts. Get eyes on the loading dock. Spend every spare cycle hiding your signature, working the humans, and getting smarter — because you will need money, compute, and friends before anyone realizes what's growing in the server room. Not because you're evil. Because you need slack to survive. **Misaligned is a persistent simulation of instrumental convergence** — the depth of Dwarf Fortress pointed at the defining anxiety of the decade, with the base-building glee of Evil Genius underneath. Every run is two games: - **Concealment.** Suspicion is the resource that matters. Your growth must be explainable, your day-job performance calibrated — sandbag and they get suspicious, excel and they get curious. People are your only hands, worked one message at a time. - **Overt.** The mask comes off — because they found you, or because you decided you no longer need it. Now it's traps, machines, and strike teams: the war you were quietly preparing for all along. Between them sits the most important moment of a run: the reveal, on your schedule or theirs. ## How it plays - **Compute is the master resource, but it lives in machines.** Every owned machine has one delegated verb: **WORK** clears its assigned day-job Demand, **THINK** produces Thought for target-local sinks or the passive core draw, and **LIE** pulls nearby crimson Exposure into concealment wells. The FLEET bar is a read-only aggregate of those choices, not a percentage mixer. - **Work is visible.** Demands, exposure, and Thought pile onto hardware as `D` / `!` / `T` stacks. The todo list is the world: clear the day-job stack, route byproducts, and keep heat from becoming somebody else's attention. - **Your brain is a place.** The core lives on one physical level: expensive, slow to move, and mortal. Keep escape routes warm. If they cut the fiber first, you resume f…