The /dev/null Backdoor

Every engineer knows /dev/null. Anything written into that path disappears. Every automatic read channel in the system skips it—it might as well not exist.

Which is precisely why someone likes to keep his backdoors there. What a man who writes things is really afraid of is forgetting his own way back in afterwards; so for any system that matters, he leaves a door only he remembers, in a place the system can't scan and he can. Across his life he has left 7 of them in various systems, and that night on the Frozen Continent he used 2.

The root directory of the Rift Instance has one as well. Oddly named, skipped by every automatic read channel, readable only from an internal view demoted to read-only. Write a command into that path and the Instance's authorisation checker never comes to look, so it runs the thing without asking, raising privilege to ROOT for a moment and stepping over the original signature limits—the window is short, and the first time it was only 4.2 seconds.

What ROOT allows goes past the boundary of the Triggerer tier. You can write an object's render priority to NULL, so the Instance no longer knows who it should be drawing first; you can also push local_gravity_vector across the whole layer, flipping the direction of gravity entirely, and in the same beat use root to pin down the 1 square metre under your own feet. 4.2 seconds is enough for both.

Stranger still is that the door behaves as though it were alive. In the instant the command went in, the Instance pulled a claw swinging down at the intruder 2 centimetres off course of its own accord, then tagged it in the system message with the word "accident." Where the far side of the door leads, and what else it connects to, nobody currently has the clearance to know.

Where the rest of those backdoors open, no one knows but the man who wrote them—and the man who wrote them can no longer remember either.