Castin raced down the corridor as fast as his booted feet would carry him, consciously avoiding the humanoid obstacles that slumped lifelessly along the path. Blaster bolts whizzed past his head and shoulders and he reflexively ducked, tucking his arms into his body a little closer. An alcove appeared in the path ahead of him and he dove for it, rolling blindly behind the durasteel wall for protection.
The hall he'd rolled into was empty. Lighting fixtures down the hall had been shot out, causing sporadic flashing and sparking to illuminate the smoke that curled through the building. The door at the end of the hall was dark, a charred hole in the wall where the keypad had been. There would be no escape.
He hugged his blaster rifle closely and tried to catch his breath, prepared to jump back into the fray for one last attempt at heroics. He poked his blaster around the corner and checked the muzzle for reflections of opponents chasing him. Seeing no movement, he leaned around the corner and peeked into the hall.
His eyebrows knitted in confusion. His pursuers were gone.
The faint sound of leather rasping against metal alerted him of his fate. He whipped his head around and raised his blaster a second too late: his assailant had already pulled the trigger. Castin's chest burned in surprise and pain as he fell backward. The figure above him cocked his head to the side and cackled.
"You newb."
...
The figure disintegrated as blinding light filled his vision; Castin threw his arm over his face to shield his eyes from the searing contrast, accidentally ripping a sensory wire from his HoloNet console.
"Kriff! The light! Kill the light!" He cursed and sprang to his feet as his squad mate burst into their shared room an hour earlier than usual.
"We are sorry," his equine roommate began, discovering no cause for distress and dimming the lights. "We heard shouting and angry noises and thought you were in trouble. Are you alright?"
"You killed me!" Castin shouted, ripping another sensor from his other arm and throwing his black plastex gauntlets and helmet against the wall in frustration. Standing, he planted his hands on his hips and glared angrily at the floor, eyes still adjusting to the change in light.
Runt blinked his large black eyes, not entirely comprehending the situation. "We don't understand. You appear to be alive."
Castin exhaled noisily and gestured frantically at a small black cylinder situated in the middle of the cluttered room. A set of cables ran from it and attached to a set of peripheral devices: a plastex headband, two plastex gauntlets and what appeared to be a toy gun already lay on the floor, while three more leads were still attached to Castin via knee braces and chest plate. Small colored lights along the tower device blinked rhythmically, indicating a HoloNet session was still active.
"Ah."
"I was winning until you barged in."
"We think you underestimate us. Our pilot mind recognized you as defeated before we interrupted. It's why we 'barged' in." He tapped his chest to indicate that Castin's own was still glowing red – a universal indicator of 'Game Over.'
Castin glanced down and felt his cheeks reddening with embarrassment. "He cheated! It's the only way he could have beat me. He cheated!"
Runt shook his head and curled his lips in approximation of a chuckle before leaving.
...
"That," the small blonde woman commented, lifting the pale red visor from her eyes to observe her blue-haired companion more clearly, "was cheating."
Ghent snorted indignantly, tapping commands into his console. "I don't have to cheat to beat him."
"Oh, well, you certainly proved that by disabling object collision and walking through walls."
"Maybe you just missed the door while you were busy blowing out the command terminals on every floor." Ghent's attention drifted toward a display of scrolling text, marking total wins and losses for the day.
"I've been to that facility. You know, in real life?" She pressed the topic, egging his ego. "There is no magical hidden door in that hall."
"I didn't cheat. I don't have to cheat to beat him," he repeated through clenched teeth.
The console chimed, announcing a challenge to a match on a private map had been issued to him. He stared. The woman laughed.
"Well, there's your chance." She pointed with defiant grin. "You don't have to cheat to beat him? Prove it."
Ghent replaced his visor and shot the 'Accept Challenge' option with his faux rifle.
...
At first, Castin felt clever by selecting his own personal map as the proving grounds for their match. He knew it like the back of his hand, having poured countless hours into creating it; fleshing out each little detail with the caliber of precision known only to artists obsessed in their work. He found personal pride in the various chips and stains in the permacreet and the distinct scraping the building doors make, sampled directly from the original source of inspiration for the map.
The level of realism was impressive enough to elicit a whistle of appreciation over the in-game comm from his opponent.
"Pretty," his opponent's youthful voice mocked. "I'll have to take a few 'caps before I splatter your brains all over the walls."
"A lot of talk for a corpse," Castin goaded in return.
The first match was quick: Castin artfully stalked down his prey, employing familiar maintenance paths and air ducting to gain an advantage. He caught his opponent from behind, while he was foolishly attempting to splice a fictitious computer terminal, and executed him with the style and grace witnessed only in graphic novels.
The second match wouldn't have ended as quickly if Castin had realized, just a moment earlier, that Ghent had already discovered one of the map's weapons storerooms. He cursed, chalking the win up to pure dumb luck, while subconsciously wondering just how much he himself would have learned from map's design interface given the same amount of time as his adversary.
It wasn't until the third, and final, match that Castin began to panic. His opponent was showing an uncanny familiarity with the map and, as Castin dove behind tables, chairs, and personally-crafted creaky doors to avoid taking critical damage, an increasing sense of guilt and consequence was building in his mind.
"You know, this is a pretty cool map," Ghent unintentionally taunted, launching a solid durasteel shelving unit into fiery oblivion with a massively overpowered weapon. "I'm pretty sure the New Republic frowns upon modeling maps after active bases, though."
And there it was: proof that his opponent was not the average adolescent; proof that he knew more than he was supposed to. Castin selectively ignored the fact that it was also proof that he would probably spend his next two lifetimes in a cell for treason.
"What?" Castin stalled, blindly lobbing a flash grenade toward the general vicinity of his opponent and counting to two before dashing out from behind his cover toward a maintenance hall.
"Your connection is broadcasting from a relay in the Commenor system. There isn't a whole lot out there." Ghent paused, buying Castin a chance to dash toward an abandoned droid repair station. "That makes you a pilot, right?"
Castin swore, his head swimming with doubt and confusion. There was no way someone could access that kind of information from the terminals he'd implemented in the map.
"You're either a merchant or military. Either way, you're a pilot."
Metallic debris crackled under Ghent's weight as he crept through the dark passage. Castin could hear him tapping his fingers against his weapon in contemplation.
The tapping stopped.
"Come on," Ghent teased the silence. "Your texture files are all labeled 'Folor.'"
"What?" Castin's outburst betrayed his position: his opponent leapt before him, weapon trained and prepared.
"I host the map servers," Ghent explained coolly. "Everything you upload gets sent directly to me."
"That's cheating!"
"What? No!" Ghent rolled his eyes and threw his free hand in the air, exasperated. "That's strategy! I get to play the maps before anyone else does. That is totally not cheating."
"That's...!" Something in the back of Castin's mind started clicking, turning the concept around and through his thoughts. He stared at his blue-haired tormentor, excited and suddenly oblivious to his surroundings. "That's ingenious!"
Ghent lowered his weapon slightly, confused by the sudden change in attitude. "Um. Thanks?"
"People just voluntarily send you addresses and blueprints of corporate and military facilities all day?"
"Tell me about it."
"Where the hell do you find the bandwidth?"
"Work. With all the information and statistics that pour through here, they barely notice."
"Where do you..?"
"Oh. I. Um." Ghent stalled, nervously wondering how to answer the question. "Census bureau."
"Right." Castin stared skeptically, his eyebrow arching slightly. The nature of the suspected lie signified that he, as an officer of the New Republic military, had the moral upper hand. The fact that his opponent did not know that he was a slicer gave him a mental one. "How about I don't tell NRI that you're storing a map of every facility a gamer is stationed at and you tell me how the software works so I can put it to good use?"
"You're bargaining with me?" Ghent's face wrinkled in disbelief; the threat was obviously not as intimidating as Castin had hoped. The young man leveled his weapon at his opponent's smug face. "How about I shoot you and pretend this never happened?"
"Your system may be good, but I'm not stupid. I track every packet transferred to and from my machine, too. Your signal has been transmitting from the same system, the same planet, for months. You can shoot me." Castin stretched his arms from his sides, offering a wider target. "But you can't simply pretend me away. I'll find you."
There was no witty retort. There was simply a flash of muzzle fire and the game went dark, faces and walls replaced with statistics and scores. Castin didn't care about having won or lost the scenario, however; the game had elevated to a different level. He had to think faster and sharper than his opponent if he was going to win.
Removing his visor, he fumbled for his console, deftly executing wordless commands which retrieved information meaningless to the untrained eye. Timestamps, packet sizes and retry attempts were normally logged by service providers for quality assurance, but years of practice had taught Castin how to tease out hidden information from the data: distances between relay stations and approximate location coordinates.
A few minutes of dedicated micro and mental processing later, and he was scrutinizing a miniature hologram the New Republic Satellite Imaging System was feeding him.
The Myrkr system: a dark and dismal forest world in, as far as Castin could tell, the middle of nowhere. He poked and prodded the display, stretching selected sections of the chart in order to hone in the image, centering on the approximate signal he'd just tracked.
As he narrowed the field of the image, a quaint little frozen beverage shop came into focus. A small blonde woman sat on the shop's patio, tapping her fingers rhythmically to an inaudible tune while toying with a hand held gaming device. She picked up her drink and chewed on her straw, bored.
Castin frowned, frustrated by the waste of time and effort. This was obviously not his opponent. He sighed, reclining into his chair and idly shedding peripherals from his person. Perhaps he'd misread the data...
The woman leaned forward, setting down her drink and reaching into her back pocket to produce a comlink. She spoke for a moment and nodded, then replaced the device and calmly stood up, fished a piece of ice from her drink and began writing on the duracreet walkway, in large, dripping print:
'HE SAYS THAT'S CHEATING.'
And with that, Castin decided it was probably best to pretend it never happened.