DATA vs ColdWire

Welcome to the year 2095! Let me get you up to speed. There’s good news and bad news. The good news is: Some things never change. People still flock to the bustling metropolises for the chance to make something of themselves, Neo-Chicago deep-dish is still the most delicious meal known to man. And betting on the Bulls is still the best short-term investment known to man. Some things have changed though. The cars hover. The guns are laser pistols. AI can finally draw fingers. And when I said that people make something of themselves, they’re mostly making themselves into cybernetically enhanced criminals. Or selling their souls to the giant corporations that run pretty much everything now. We’ll call those guys corpos. And I know that’s not worse than criminal but … it kind of feels worse. It’s not all bad though. The hottest new tech on the streets is called “Daylight”. You know solar panels? It’s like that. Except like a million times stronger. And people have been building some pretty amazing things with it. Mecha robots. Supercomputers. Crazy new cybernetic augments. But you’ve gotta make hay while the sun shines because when night falls, all that stuff goes offline and we’re living in 2092 again. One thing’s for sure. There’s no shortage of adventure for corpos *or* criminals... Or hackers, vidjocks, ripperdocs, triggerheads, brutes or storytellers. It’s time for you to go find your own adventures and make your own stories. Who are you going to be?

You are an operator on a global grid. Somebody pays you to get into a machine you have no business being inside, take the one thing they asked for, and leave nothing behind that says you were there. Every connection starts a countdown. ROUTE IN Bounce through relays scattered across the world map. More hops and harder relays buy you time. A direct connection is fast and puts your own address in their log. BREACH UNDER TRACE Crack the security stack layer by layer while the trace climbs toward you. Recon first and you learn what you are walking into: how many walls, how hard, and which two have a gap a bypass kit can slip through. Go in blind and you find out the expensive way. Deep systems want more than a password. Mint a one time code from their own token seed, or ride a session somebody else already authenticated. Plant a toolkit beside their seeds and that machine hands you a code every visit for five hours. TAKE IT AND GO Read the files. Copy the archive, drain the vault, rewrite the record, plant the payload. Then overwrite the access log, because the line it keeps has your address on it, and disconnect before the trace finds home. THE WORK Jobs come from sixteen clients who all want different things and say so in their own voice. A grade fixed before a scholarship review. A record scrubbed a week before an immigration interview. A charge filed against somebody who never earned it. A company whose real machine does not face the internet, reachable only through the gateway you have to read properly first. Or the one job where nobody breaks in at all: a client was hit last week and cannot tell you how. They hand you credentials. Read their access log, find the intruder among a dozen honest connections, name the service that should never have been exposed, and say which file went out of the door. WHAT YOU LEARN ON THE WAY Real services on real ports. A field manual that fills itself in as you meet each one, in plain language. Firewall rules, address ranges, jump hosts, second factors, why a log matters. By the third job you will know what 5432 is without anyone telling you. OTHER OPERATORS Build a subnet of walls, honeypots and tarpits, because other players raid your credits while you sleep. Scout them first, take thirty percent on a clean breach, and watch the replay. Join a crew and climb a season. Free to play. Server authoritative. No ads.