Black Box - Hacker Day One

You have 72 hours before the missiles launch.

Someone inside North Korea has armed the HWASONG-19s. Several warheads, several targets, with Seoul and Tokyo near the top of the list. Talks fell apart days ago, and hitting the launch sites by force only starts the war a few hours early. So the people who can't be seen doing anything quietly called in someone who doesn't officially exist. That part is where you come in.

Black Box - Hacker Day One is a hacking game that takes place entirely inside a simulated desktop. There's no interface sitting on top of it. The desktop is the game. You open a terminal and type, drag windows around, read your email, buy gear off a darknet market, and pick your way into a military network one server at a time.

Operation Lunar Redirect

Your handler goes by Mr. Bob and feeds you objectives through an encrypted messenger. The operator before you went by Ghost. He set the whole thing up and then dropped off the grid three days ago, but his files are still on the machine: dead drops, half-written notes, a map of the network. It's enough to pick up where he left off, assuming you can keep up with him.

The plan itself sounds unhinged. Get inside the STAR-7 network and rewrite the targeting on every rocket so they all point at the same empty stretch of the Moon, the Sea of Tranquility. They still launch. The world still panics for a few minutes. Then everyone watches them sail up and out into nothing, and not one person dies.

What you actually do

• Type real commands. ls, cd, cat, ssh, nmap, exploit and decrypt all go into a terminal that behaves like one.
• Go after WiFi. Scan the air, crack passwords, and climb onto networks that get harder to break the closer you get to the target.
• Take servers apart. Scan the ports, drop a payload, get root, then SSH in and walk off with files and credentials.
• Spend your Bitcoin. Adapters, exploit kits, rootkits, a VPN, wordlists, and if the wallet stretches that far, a zero-day.
• Read the other side's mail. Launch codes and classified files are sitting in inboxes nobody ever meant for you to open.
• Clean up behind you. Wipe the logs, cycle the VPN, and stay ahead of the trace before it works out where you're sitting.

All of it stays in the fiction

Nothing in Black Box lives outside the world. The briefing arrives as an email. Your money sits in a wallet app. Tips come from contacts on the darknet. A miner grinds away at Bitcoin in the background while the radio plays and the clock shows the actual time. When Mr. Bob says something, you watch the words land as he types them. There are no cutscenes and nothing loads between scenes. You sit at the desk and the deadline keeps moving toward you.

Five phases, and it keeps getting heavier

• Orient. Learn the machine, read what Ghost left behind, study the map, dig his dead drops out of /tmp.
• Recon. Get online, crack the embassy WiFi, and find the way into the DPRK network.
• Breach. Pop the border router, move through the servers behind it, and slip past a live trace.
• Access. Get onto the command server, read General Pak's email, and lift some Bitcoin off an exchange to pay for the last job.
• Endgame. Reach launch control, find the override key, and change where those rockets are going.

Side work, and things you weren't meant to find

Not all of it is the mission. Strangers email you out of nowhere. A Nigerian minister wants a security audit and keeps swearing it's completely legitimate. The neighbour's router turns out to be a CIA listening post. There are files on a government archive that have no business existing. The jobs pay, and honestly they tell you more about this world than the main operation does. How clean you stay and who you decide to trust both feed into how the whole thing ends, and once you've seen it through there's a sandbox waiting where you can take the gloves off and just play.

Features

• A full fake desktop with windowed apps, a taskbar and a start menu.
• A working terminal, more than 30 commands, over a virtual filesystem.
• A five-act story carried by your handler and by whatever you find lying around the machine.
• A darknet shop full of tools you upgrade as the heat climbs.
• WiFi cracking, port scanning, exploits and SSH that all feed into each other.
• An inbox that fills up with story beats and side jobs on a timer.
• A Bitcoin economy you earn from, steal from, and pour straight back into gear.
• CRT-style feedback that flickers, shakes and reacts to what you're doing.
• Saving, autosave, and more than one way the story can land.
• No hand-holding anywhere. You work it out, the same way you'd have to for real.