Hypervisor

Hypervisor is a city of two layers. The upper city—the one the tourists see—is a simulacrum. The sun shines, the trams run on time, and the buildings are faced with polite, compiled stone. But this is merely the "Guest" layer. The real city, the "Host," lies beneath, accessible only to those who know how to break the rules of reality.

The inhabitants of the underside are reverse-engineers. They spend their days looking for cracks in the sky of the upper city—glitches, "VM exits," places where the illusion wears thin. They build ladders out of "trampolines" and "hooks" to climb up and manipulate the world above. They can pause the sun in the sky, rewrite the laws of gravity for a single street, or make themselves invisible to the guards.

The relationship between the two cities is parasitic yet symbiotic. The upper city provides the structure, the game to be played; the lower city provides the freedom to break it. The traveler who enters Hypervisor must be careful. If they stare too long at a reflection in a window, they might see the code running behind it, and once seen, the illusion of the upper city can never be trusted again.