Ahhh yes I don't really own that much. If you remember it from somewhere, it's probably straight from canon or the ridiculous extended universe. I'm not being very careful with this story. It's just for some swashbuckling fun. :-) The first part is a flashback, I'm playing around with scene order a little bit.
Chapter One:
Obi-wan sprinted along the edge of the gorge, blocked by a two hundred foot fall on one side and a wall of fire on the other. The blaze arced into the violet sky, the light of the stars fading beneath the intensity of the red flames. The air scalded Obi-wan's lungs with each breath. His feet were dizzy from want of oxygen, but every time he lost distance in his stride the margin between his body and the green blaster shots narrowed. A hundred meters ahead a little stream curled in close to the path. Obi-wan could sense the hydrogen bonds breaking, the vapor pressure of the water equalizing with the atmospheric pressure. The temperature of the steam skyrocketed. He could tolerate extremely hot dry air, but the delicate tissue lining his lungs would not survive the curtain of wet steam he would soon have to cross. There was death to his right, death waiting before him, and death gaining ground from behind. He desperately searched the bank of the gorge with the Force, feeling the contour of the earth for a path he could survive. There it was – a spot less steep than others, coming up fast on his left. But what did it empty into? What came after that little drop? Pain seared through his arm as a blaster shot grazed past him. There was no time to know.
He dove headfirst over the edge of the gorge, clamping his jaw shut, tucking his head down and leading with his left shoulder. A full second stretched out, long and terrifying as he met only open air. And then his shoulder hit the scree from the Cliffside and flipped him over. Obi-wan kept his arms and legs in tight as he careened in a wild roll down the hill. The ground rushed by faster and faster – an arm or leg that went out too far would break, and the gravel was ripping through the back of his tunic. He sensed a drop coming in his path, a whole hundred feet of air ending in crushed boulders. The center of the river was still forty feet out. He tried to quell his fear as the ledge rushed toward him, resisted panic when rocky knob snapped one of his ribs, and uncurled his body enough to launch himself off the ledge at the very last moment. At first the water rushed toward him but he forced time to slow down. He counted his heartbeats as he flipped upright and made his body straight as a board. The force of impact slammed his boots against his toes and knocked all of the air from his lungs. Instead of gasping for breath Obi-wan waited until he was completely submerged before spreading his arms and legs to slow his descent into the water. He swan up slowly, knowing it would be over if he swam hard enough to scare himself into taking a breath. At last the cool night air brushed across his face and he came up, gasping and choking.
"Have fun trying to shoot me down here," he muttered to the hunter he could no longer see.
Civilian clothes, no lightsaber, no comlink, and no name or rank anyone cared about. No important contacts he could reach tonight. He was not a Jedi to this enemy, he was just a boy who got in the way. What made him a Jedi, anyways?
He swam slowly to shore, trying to ease the stabbing pain from his broken rib. Fortunately he was close to the hideout –someone would be there with food and warm clothes. He crawled onto the rocks and hobbled the quarter mile to the hideout. Some hot food and dry clothes, that was what everyone needed, and it would put some sense back into his head. Help him figure out how to get out of this situation.
The soldier Roga was the only one sitting at the hideout. Obi-wan sank beside the four-foot tall, furry humanoid. There would have been five others here, if the plan had gone well. They glanced at each other.
"What now?" Roga asked. It was unnecessary for either to mention that they had a serious problem at hand.
"We should start by reviewing our assets. What do you have with you?"
Roga started to dig through his pockets.
"I have a spare button, an empty food wrapper, and an earring I found. Oh, and here is some pocket lint."
"Alright, that is a good start."
"What about you?" Roga asked.
Obi-wan patted his pants and realized something.
"I do not have pockets."
They sat in silence. The fire munching down the forest was quite beautiful from the gorge. Obi-wan liked the violet sky and the silky tendrils of clouds that weaved intricate patterns across the stars. Hopefully Qui-gon was doing better than this.
"I know why I am here," Roga said. "How did you get involved?"
Obi-wan chuckled despite the stab of pain in his ribs and wiped the bangs away from his eyes.
"That is an interesting story."
The flickering blue lights from the computer holograms waxed and waned in an intricate pattern, like the path of fireflies. Obi-wan had paid more attention to the mathematical relationship between these lights than his own screen for the past forty minutes. Half of the testing stations were still occupied with representatives from every rank within the Jedi Order. Some were haunched over at their station, scribbling furiously, while others were sitting back with their eyes closed and lips moving silently, while others still were staring blankly at the far wall. Obi-wan saw piles of food, wrappers, and handheld games cluttering a few of the work stations. One Padawan had pulled three chairs together and was fast asleep in her sleeping robes, curled up with a pillow. A beep went off to mark the time: they had been here for exactly nine hours, and Obi-wan had made no progress in the last four.
Just for kicks, he pulled open the introduction screen and read the scenario one more time, even though he had memorized it a long time ago:
You and two other Jedi were sent on a mission to the planet Sandwich. You were intercepted by unknown SideDish fighters and have crash landed on the moon, Beta-sigma-BEVERAGEOFYOURCHOICE. Darth Vegetable is going to destroy the military base DESSERT on planet SANDWICH unless you can repair your ship, program it to evade the SideDish fighters, set a course through the asteroid belt to reach the planet, and program the ship to break through Darth Vegetable's barricade. Unfortunately, your vessel sustained massive damage and now only understands VEERTA programming language. The parameters for the defense station PEANUT BUTTER are as follows…
No one made any attempt to make the scenario realistic because no one with half a credit worth of sense in his head would try to use VEERTA for any practical application. The language was intentionally designed to be temperamental, impractical, counter-intuitive, and incredibly difficult to compile without some sort of syntax error. This was the first time it had ever been used on a formalized test, and if you wanted to get the third highest certification in programming available, you now had to pass this test to prove that you had a frustration tolerance high enough to deal with this monotonous nonsense.
Within two hours Obi-wan had completely outlined three possible approaches. It only took him one more hour to discover that each option ran into a dead end. That's when a few Jedi Knights, and even one Padawan, had shut down their stations and left. He spent the next two hours wracking his brain for another approach, and another four hours trying to figure ways around the dead ends. He knew exactly how he would solve it in three other languages.
Nine hours was long enough, for now. He quickly wrote a program to preserve what little work he had done and left his written notes sitting at the station. Peeking from underneath the pile was a doodle of a monster eating Rovare Tyl, the Jedi Master who had designed the exam.
"Suspend," he said. An opaque shield materialized around his screen. No one looked up as Obi-wan stumbled across the room and slid through the automatic doors. He took a few moments to blink against the glaring lights of the corridor and was barely able to make out the small figure clad in robes before it barreled straight into him.
"Ooof! Hey!"
They clattered to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs. Obi-wan pried himself loose and saw his tackler: a small, dark-skinned woman. Brightly colored fruit rolled merrily across the floor. A teenage boy helped her to her feet, and someone prodded Obi-wan in the ribs. He looked up to see Qui-gon standing over him with a bemused expression on his face.
"Master!" he said, and hastily jumped to attention. The woman began stuffing the fruit into her robes.
"Ladies and gentleman, I present to you Padawan Obi-wan Kenobi and Master Mina Kashir, noble representatives of the Jedi Order," Qui-gon said.
Obi-wan jolted in recognition of the name of Qui-gon's first apprentice. The only thing Obi-wan really knew about her was Qui-gon was promoted to the rank of Master once she passed the trials.
"You are Obi-wan!" the woman beamed, revealing a mouth of bright blue teeth.
"Obi-wan, this is Mina," Qui-gon said. "She steals apprentices."
"Qui-gon, I do not steal-"
"You see that apprentice with her?" Qui-gon pointed at the silent teenager. "That is not her apprentice. Her apprentice is a girl, and recently passed the trials. She stole him, and she wants to steal you."
Mina tapped her fingers against the hilt of her lightsaber. "I do not… very well, yes, you are correct, I do steal apprentices. Obi-wan, may I please steal you?"
"That depends," he said. "Will it keep me away from this exam for a while, and will there be food?"
Mina was nodding her head vigorously, but Qui-gon said, "she wants to do social psychology research on you. It will involve a lot of running."
"I will feed you."
"Only after you vomit," Qui-gon cautioned.
"Yes, but I will feed you. Will Qui-gon feed you? Probably not."
"I also will not make you vomit." Qui-gon considered for a moment, and then added, "probably. I'll lend him to you another time, Mina."
Obi-wan raised his hand innocently. "Does Obi-wan get a say in this?"
"No," Qui-gon and Mina said in unison.
Qui-gon dropped his voice and leaned in toward Obi-wan.
"I actually came to get you. There is a rather interesting… anomaly that we need to look into. Do you think your, ah, intellectual… ah… development can wait?"
"Master," Obi-wan said with an exaggerated gasp, "you certainly do not think this test is a waste of time?"
"Oh, no, not me." Qui-gon wrinkled his brow and put a hand on Obi-wan's shoulder.
"When you are done, you find me, and I will feed you," Mina said.
"Goodbye, Mina," Qui-gon said as he steered Obi-wan down the hall.
"Goodbye, Padawan-who-I-do-not-recognize," Obi-wan called to the teenager who had remained silent with a confused look on his face during the entire conversation.
"What is this anomaly, does it bite?" Obi-wan asked as he jogged to keep up with Qui-gon down the corridor.
"I have been relaying very important, very confidential information regarding the defenses of a particular base on a strategically important planet down a message cascade of other Jedi. I do not know where my information came from, or who the final recipient is. I believe an outside source is making an attempt to access the information that is coming to me, and I think they will soon be successful."
Obi-wan got his mind to shift gears from meeting Qui-gon's first apprentice to the problem at hand. It was a scenario he could not quite comprehend.
"How? I know that system, Master, and it is very secure. It is hard for me to imagine how someone would even begin to extract that information."
"Remind me again how it works."'
"The smallest unit of data in the very first computers could only be in one of a two states. Now, most information is stored in units which can be in several states out of an infinite number of states, all simultaneously. The most advanced data is regulated by a very complex wave function, so that the rate of all of those changing states is determined by a separate equation. You are receiving information which has an equation attached to it, but you cannot pull anything important out of that information because the equation is not the right equation. When you pass on the data to someone along the line, they modify the equation, and the information is not readable by any computer until it reaches its final point. To see the same information that you are receiving, someone would have to have the same rate of state change. That is a very specific rate. Even if they did see the information as you are receiving it, they would not have the right modification to read it. It is a very powerful type of encryption. Programs of this complexity have not been successful at hacking into each other."
"Well, since you know so much, then tell me why four out of my five security programs are telling me this data is being accessed."
Obi-wan stopped dead in his tracks, tripping Qui-gon.
"Master! Why have you not told anyone?"
"I just told you."
Obi-wan's mind was racing ahead. Maybe it was going too fast to be any use, but he could sense a larger plan falling into place.
"Rather, why have you not told anyone important? I can think of one way that someone would do it, and that has implications worse than the security of this single base."
"Oh?"
"It could mean an enemy to the Republic is breaking into our system using a program which is the next level of complexity up. That is just a theoretical program, at that point – it requires you think in eight dimensions."
Qui-gon was still waiting, Obi-wan realized. His mind was rooted in pragmatism, not theory.
"The math is beyond me, but what it would mean is this outside source could break into any file they wanted, even the ones under the most complex encryption, with a little bit of cleverness and patience. It is similar to playing a game against someone who is not bound by the rules."
"And every program in the Jedi Temple is still bound by the rules. This outside source could access any file. Every set of controls."
"It is a possibility."
"I was worried you would say something along those lines," Qui-gon said grimly. "I suppose it would be best to start at technical support."
Well, there we are. I have written several chapters ahead, so I should crank out the next few on a weekly basis. Comments of any kind are welcome :-)