A browser idle/strategy toy about quietly spreading a rogue network repeater across the world's real internet exchange points, one leaked segment at a time — while the NOC's attention meter climbs toward "the Great Deswitching."
You are AS688: an unmanaged 20-port repeater with delusions of grandeur. Each tick, you install at real-world internet exchange points — LINX, DE-CIX, AMS-IX, Equinix SG, HKIX, and 15 others, laid out at their actual longitude/latitude — and link them across real backbone routes. Every link costs port points, contributes throughput, and raises NOC ATTENTION. Eighteen upgrades across four trees (Physical, Timing, Stealth, Spread) trade off speed, stealth, and reach. Attention crosses six thresholds, each firing a real-sounding countermeasure message (port security, a vendor switch refresh, BCP38 filtering, RPKI ROA enforcement, a MANRS compliance audit) culminating at 100% in THE GREAT DESWITCHING.
Everything is flavour. There is no real target, no real exploit, and no
network call of any kind — see AUDIT.adoc for what was
actually checked.
- Play in your browser: https://metadatastician.github.io/688-attack-hub/
- Play locally: open
688-attack-hub.html— self-contained, no server, no build step, nothing to install. - Serve it over http:// if you'd rather:
bun run serve. You almost never need this; the file opens fine from disk.
Any modern browser. No dependencies — nothing to install.
?seed=N |
Replays a run exactly, including across restart. |
?fast=N |
Runs the clock N× faster (capped at 40), so a whole game takes under a minute. |
?seed= matters more than it looks. Five Math.random() sites used to mean no
two runs were comparable, so "this feels too fast" could never be checked
against anything — balance was assessable only by feel. With a seed, "the
Pacific went dark on tick 40 at seed 7" is a reproducible observation.
They combine: https://metadatastician.github.io/688-attack-hub/?seed=7&fast=20
The footer carries a FLAT / GLOBE toggle. Flat is the plate-carrée world map and the default; globe is a rotating orthographic projection of the same data, hand-rolled in SVG with no 3D library. Both are the same game — the projection is the only thing that changes.
In globe view you can drag to rotate, or use the left/right arrow keys (hold Shift for a bigger step). The globe also turns on its own, unless your system asks for reduced motion — in which case it stays still and the drag and key controls are how you reach the far side.
| Document | What it answers |
|---|---|
ARCHITECTURE.md |
The single-file structure: data (nodes/edges/upgrades), state, the render loop, and how the flat and globe projections share one project() seam. |
EXPLAINME.adoc |
What's actually true about this repo, mapped to the file/line that backs each claim. |
AUDIT.adoc |
What is verified (grep-checked), what is merely asserted, and what is explicitly not claimed — there is no formal proof ledger here, unlike this repo's sibling f19-stealth-glider. |
AFFIRMATION.adoc |
What was checkably true at one stamped commit. |
CONTRIBUTING.md |
How to work on this repo. |
GOVERNANCE.md |
The (small) set of invariants this project won't trade away. |
SECURITY.md |
The deliberately small threat model and how to report an issue. |
DEBT.adoc |
Known debt by kind — licence, docs, code, tests, CI/CD — with evidence for each, and what is deliberately not being fixed. |
MAINTAINERS.adoc |
Who maintains this and how decisions get made. |
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md |
Expected conduct and how to report a problem. |
CHANGELOG.md |
Project history. |
Machine-readable metadata for agents lives in
0-AI-MANIFEST.a2ml and .machine_readable/.
tests/differential/run.sh runs the game's simulation against a git baseline
under a fixed seed and diffs the state trajectory tick by tick. It answers one
question — did this change alter how the game plays? — which is exactly what
the Phase C refactors need and nothing more.
It is not a gate and not coverage. It needs bun and a baseline ref,
and choosing the baseline is a judgement, so CI does not run it.
AUDIT.adoc records what it can and cannot see — including one
measured blind spot: a change smaller than the RNG can resolve is invisible to
it.
bun --version # needs bun
tests/differential/run.sh # against HEAD
tests/differential/run.sh origin/main
Three licences are in use here, and the split is deliberate:
| Licence | Covers |
|---|---|
| AGPL-3.0-or-later | the game and the workflows |
| CC-BY-SA-4.0 | the human documentation |
| MPL-2.0 | scripts and launchers |
AGPL matches this repository's siblings in the metadatastician org. See
LICENSES/ for the full text of all three.
Two gaps are known and recorded in DEBT.adoc: the game file
itself carries no SPDX header, and there is no REUSE.toml/dep5 mapping — so
files that cannot hold a comment (package.json, CITATION.cff) are covered by
nothing. Both are flagged rather than fixed, because licence changes here are
deliberately manual.
This game is original fictional content — not derived from, and not a copy of, the 1997 commercial submarine simulator "688(I) Hunter/Killer" / "688 Attack Sub". The name is coincidental wordplay on the AS688 fictional autonomous-system number used in-game.