The Box Is a Lie: Open-World Environments Without Real Machines

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Presented at BSidesAugusta 2026 by

Andrew Stein

The expected path is where a simulated environment feels most convincing. The real test begins when someone treats it like an open world, wanders off the route, and pushes toward what should be the edge. This talk asks whether the illusion can hold when the machine being explored does not actually exist: no provisioned system, no command execution, just believable responses produced in real time. For deception, training, and security research, that kind of sustained exploration is valuable, but traditional labs make it expensive because every believable layer has to be built and maintained, especially for legacy hosts, industrial systems, carrier-grade equipment, or exotic architectures. This talk explores a just-in-time approach that uses guided language models to render the world around the user instead of building it in advance. Through real examples and a demo of the working implementation, I will share design choices, failure modes, and lessons from a system that must generate, remember, and react in real time. The result is a different way to think about simulated environments: not building every possible branch in advance, but creating believable depth at the moment exploration demands it.