One network. It remembers everything you do to it.
The Grid is a text game you play over SSH. There is no client to install, no account to make and no launcher. Your public key is your name. You open a terminal, you connect, and you are somewhere.
Somewhere is a network of millions of addresses, most of them dark. The live ones are running software with real version numbers and real flaws. Some of them are defended. Some of them carry data that is worth money to somebody. A handful are wired to the actual world and will tell you what the weather is doing right now, several thousand miles from wherever you are sitting.
ssh runner@coldice.sh
Any SSH client. Any key. First connection creates the account — there is nothing else to do.
What it is
A sandbox with a network where the map would be.
You are a runner: somebody who gets into machines they were not invited into. Nobody gives you a quest. You are given a deck, a handful of credits and the address of one bulletin board, and everything after that is a consequence of something you chose.
The whole network is generated from a single seed, which means it is identical for every
player and identical forever. The machine at 62.14.64.1 is the same machine for
you as it is for everyone else, today and in two years. When you find something good, the
address is worth telling people. When you tell them, it is still there.
Mostly you are alone against the machines. Sometimes you are not — other runners are on the same network at the same time, standing in the same rooms, and they can see you standing there.
Systems
Everything here is running right now.
The intrusion loop
Sweep a range. Probe what answered. Get in through a password, a flaw in a service, or a door you left open last time. Then read everything, take what is worth taking, and get out before the log gets read.
Noise, alert, trace
Every action you take is heard. Suspicion accumulates on the machine, not on you, and when it crosses a line the node starts working out where you are. You then have between thirty and ninety seconds, and you are going to want most of them.
ICE that does something
Five classes, and each one is a different problem. A sentry makes everything you do twice as loud. A barrier walls off the valuable files. A trapdoor plants bait. A hunter keeps tracing after you drop the link. Black ICE comes back down the wire and burns programs off your deck.
Your true name
Heat cools off. A name does not. Every runner has six facts about who they actually are, and a completed trace writes one of them into a security log on the machine that caught you. Get back in and destroy it and it never happened. Leave it forty hours and it is public, permanently, and anybody can read it.
Equipment and experience
A crack fails because your wordlist is cheap, not because a die came up wrong. An exploit fails because the flaw is too obscure for the kit you own. Both get better: one by spending money, one by doing it a few hundred times.
Machines you build
With a forge, a long earnings history and enough money, you can put your own machine on a dark address. It is scannable, probeable and breakable like anything else. You choose the ICE. You write the files. Other runners will find it, and some of them will get in.
Boards, work and a market
Bulletin boards on real nodes, with categories, replies and reputation gates. Contracts that are checked against what actually happened in the world. And data for sale, where the tenth copy of a leak is worth a fraction of the first.
Other people
See who is standing on the node with you. Search thousands of handles. Page somebody anywhere on the network. Talk in a room that exists at an address, which means a meeting can be arranged somewhere nobody else has found.
Real data, leaking in
A few machines are not invented. A weather station reports what the weather is actually doing in five real cities. A wire desk carries what engineers are arguing about today. A seismic node lists earthquakes that really happened this morning.
Your first twenty minutes
Nobody is going to explain this twice.
The game teaches you the first run and then stops holding your hand. If you would rather arrive knowing something, this is what a runner would tell you in a bar.
# type less. Any unambiguous prefix works, so disc is disconnect. Tab completes commands, addresses you know, and files in front of you. # read everything. Files are how the network opens up. An auth log has addresses in it. A config has a password in it. A note somebody left in their home directory has both, and sometimes a reason to feel bad. # the log is the evidence. Getting root and leaving is not getting away with it. wipe takes your session out of the auth log. Learn it early, because one day it will be taking something far more expensive out. # probe before you touch. It costs nothing and it tells you the tier, the ICE, how long a trace would take, and whether your kit can do anything about the software that is running. # the quiet way is the cheap way. Cracking is loud. Exploiting is fast and unreliable. A credential you found written down somewhere is silent, and a back door you planted last week is better than all three. # the bottom of the map is where you learn. Tier 1 sectors are full of weather stations and print servers that nobody has looked at in years. Tier 5 is a military core and it will take your deck off you. # there is a machine that belongs to nobody where the standings are kept. It has no password and no ICE. Finding the address is the only lock on it, and nobody who has it will just give it to you. # help is grouped, and hint will tell you what to do next if you are standing still. Neither of them is cheating.
The thing everyone has heard of
DAMOCLES
Ask any runner who has been on the Grid more than a month and they will tell you the same story with different details. There is a code. It opens anything. It is not an exploit, because exploits are specific and this is not. Nobody has produced it. Everybody knows somebody who nearly did.
The rumour turns up roughly once in a thousand files: in an internal memo that was never meant to circulate, in a manifest with one entry missing, in a transcript that ends with the other party closing the session. The fragments below are all real. They are sitting on real machines on the network right now, and somebody found each of them by breaking into something.
Dr Aarons maintains it is not a program. She says it is a shape — that any sufficiently old network grows the same hole in the same place, and Damocles is simply the word for knowing where to stand.
— /srv/notes/incident.txt · Cassini Research, Lab 11 · root only> is Damocles real
that is not a question I am permitted to hold.
> who does not permit you
[session closed by remote host]
manifest lists 11 files. archive contains 10. the missing entry is named DAMOCLES.FRAG and the checksum column for it is blank. do not raise a ticket.
— recovered from an archive node, sector unrecordedTape 4,411 is checked out. It has been checked out for eleven years. The card says AARONS, CASSINI — 48hr loan.
— /srv/index.txt · Ossuary RecordsBoard's decision: the work stops, the segment burns, nobody uses the word. Dr Aarons did not attend the meeting. Nobody has been able to reach her.
— /srv/notes/incident.txt · Cassini ResearchHere is the part worth saying plainly, because the genre is full of people promising something that is not there: it exists. There is an address, there is a door and there is a way through the door. It was built before the first player connected. Nobody has found it, and the honest expectation is that nobody will for a very long time.
If you get there, you will know. So will everyone else.
Practical
What you need, which is almost nothing.
Requirements
An SSH client and a terminal. That is the entire list. It is drawn with 24-bit colour where there is 24-bit colour, sixteen colours where there is not, and plain ASCII on anything that cannot manage either.
Your key is your account
There is no password, no email address and no signup form. The fingerprint of whatever key your client offers becomes your identity, and the handle attached to it is yours to change once you are inside.
Small screens are fine
Eighty columns is plenty. The display degrades on its own as the window narrows — the head-up display gives its rows back below seventy-six columns — and the prompt stays pinned to the bottom while everything scrolls above it.
Old hardware is a design target
There is a second skin in the renderer: pure ASCII, sixteen colours, no box drawing and nothing that moves, so a machine that cannot manage the rest still gets the whole game rather than a broken copy of it. The server deliberately still offers the old key exchanges those clients need.
An Amiga 1200 running Roadshow is the machine this is aimed at. Nobody has connected from one yet, and the day somebody does is the day it is finished. A C64 Ultimate would be the better story — that one is an ambition rather than a promise.
It costs nothing
There is nothing to buy. No subscription, no early access, no cosmetics and no currency you pay real money for. Every credit in the game came out of the game. This is not a business, it is a network somebody built.
The world is permanent
One seed, one network, no wipes and no seasons. The machine at an address today is the machine that will be at that address in two years, and the back door you left on it is still there unless somebody swept it. Nothing resets, which is the only reason anything you do is worth doing.