APPENDIX C

It is 1993. Someone pays you to dial into a machine you have no business being on, take something off it, and leave. The machine answers the way a machine of that year would — DIR, CD, TYPE, SCAN, SU — and a trace meter climbs the whole time you are working.

It only climbs when you act. You can open every file on the volume for nothing. Copying one is what they notice.

How it plays

• A real command line, not a menu wearing one. Wrong commands, wrong paths and wrong passwords all behave the way DOS behaved.

• BRIEF tells you what is still outstanding. TRACE tells you how close they are. Nothing is hidden from you except what the machine's owners hid.

• Every run is ranked on how much of the line you burned, and the ranks are kept per contract. GHOST means nobody has any idea you were there.

Five contracts

Five machines, five clients, five different problems. What they have in common is that the rules are not the same on any two of them — something you learned on the last job will be the thing that gets you caught on the next.

Working that out is most of the game, so it is not written down here.

1993, kept honestly

• Amber, green or ice phosphor, with scanlines, bloom and a vignette

• Every sound is a real recording of the period, quantised to 8-bit

• A full dial-up handshake on launch, because that is how you get in

• Roughly an evening to finish. Considerably longer to finish quietly.