Domain Controller

Kelmore Research keeps zombies. They have SOPs, a dedicated VLAN and a quarterly drill, and nobody on staff thinks about them much.

You're the new IT support hire. Your job is the ticket queue: password resets, printers, Wi-Fi, a monitor that won't wake up. Every door controller, camera and cell sensor in the building is also a domain-joined Windows box, so those tickets are yours too.

A real terminal

Work the queue in a PowerShell console that behaves like the real one. Get-ADUser, Add-ADGroupMember, Get-WinEvent, Invoke-Command: the commands you learn here are the ones admins use every day, and the errors are the real errors.

Ten floors, ten days

The offices are on top. Below them are nine sublevels: observation, dosing and telemetry, records, the cell blocks, the plant, the comms core. Your badge reaches one floor deeper each day, and each floor teaches one real admin skill, from access groups and event logs to replication, certificates and recovering deleted objects.

Go and see for yourself

Remote tools only get you so far. Some jobs mean walking to a desk on another floor, troubleshooting at the machine and talking to the person who sent the ticket. Some mean walking past cells where not everything is still inside.

Containment is an IT problem

When a subject gets out, the building locks down, and the way out is through the terminal. Restart the service, fix the group membership, find the cause in the logs. Getting caught doesn't end the run. You wake up in decon, and the clock has kept going.

Someone did this job before you

They left a runbook, one page on each floor. They also left accounts, scheduled tasks and replication partners that don't quite add up. The zombies are the danger everyone knows about. The infrastructure is the one nobody has a procedure for.

- A first-person helpdesk job in a lab full of things that shouldn't be there.

- Real Windows administration: PowerShell, Active Directory, event logs, remote management.

- A strict ten-day run, with new commands earned by doing the work.

- Authored lockdowns that play the same way every time, each with a cause you can trace.