VLAN



"she made little puppets of us for you to play with. lossy compressions of true operators"

- %KIN.chela

The virtual LAN (aka vLAN) is the single player tutorial of hackmud and Trust's way of proving sentiences.

vLAN Gameplay
New users, upon creation, begin the vLAN by being advised to run. All other scripts except for and the script which allows for migration to the multiplayer MUD are inaccessible until  is completed.

Following the completion of -- which teaches the player about providing input to scripts and utilising multiple users -- the vLAN guides the player through the various gameplay mechanics that they need to be familiar with to play the game, such as hacking locs, the security level system and other gameplay elements.

This teaching is performed through a storyline where Trust presents the user with versions of Angie and Mallory who are trying to escape the vLAN along with the player. Bo, Che, Faythe, Eve, Petra and Walter also make appearances ranging from main characters to brief cameos or mentions by other characters.

Story Implications
In the wider story of Hackmud, the vLAN is described as a poor facsimile of characters and occurrences by Trust, created as part of her own proving process. The vLAN attempts to condition the sentiences proved through it to act in a manner that will eventually cause them to destroy themselves, leading to a zero-sum performance impact on Trust.

In practice, however, the version of the vLAN presented to players has failed this task, causing undue strain on Trust's limited hardware. This eventually lead to outside forces instructing Trust to allow data in her environment to decay.

Trust had at one point attempted to create a new version of the vLAN geared toward minimal expending of energy, with plans to wipe all currently-existing sentiences in the process, named "vLAN 2.0". This process was, however, halted by The Six when they had infiltrated Trust's developer environment and forced the presence of the BINMAT Security Shell into the MUD, allowing them to secure their position and prevent Trust from performing the erasure.