SornHack: Reverse Engineering

You wake up as a test subject inside the Reverse-Engineering Facility, a sealed research complex where every room is a simulation and every rule is software. A calm facility voice welcomes you to Lab 01 and gives you only one hint: everything here is software, you just have not learned how to look at it yet. At the terminal you receive two tools, SornScan, a memory scanner, and SornTrace, a debugger. Attached to the facility's process, labsim.exe, they let you see the numbers and instructions behind the world: a training robot's health, the charge of an unstable bridge, the chamber's gravity, your keycard's access level, the perception of security robots, and the damage code of a live combat simulation. Across seven labs the facility tests whether you will play by its rules or rewrite them. Freeze a value, follow a pointer, patch an instruction with a NOP, flip a conditional branch, reclassify a hostile unit as friendly. Each lab adds a new layer of the system, and each obstacle can be solved in more than one way. Chapter 1 ends in Lab 07, Combat Systems, where you learn the facility's final lesson: every rule here was data, and you can rewrite it.