“How did you get in here? What’s your Ident Code?” Neville barked at the figure on the ground in front of them.

“None of your business asshole. Who do you think you are anyways?” The figure shot back.

“She’s the one who is going to terminate your ass and box you up inside that cesspit you call a brain. How would you like to get cut off ‘completely’, as in forever?” Marcus said over her shoulder.

“You can’t do that! All you can do is deactivate my account and block me from the servers. I can have a new account up and running and be back here as fast as you can try to block me. Man, once this sort of treatment gets out, no one will want to play here, then where will you be?”

“You think this is a game? You think we’re a bunch of frat boys amped up on energy drinks in our mom’s basements? Shit kid, you are so far in over your head you can’t even see the light. We know you hacked your way in here, and that means you’re looking at cyber terrorism charges. That means shutting off your access to the Internet. Forever. Well, assuming you survive prison.”

“Prison?!? What the hell? I can’t go to prison for playing a video game!”

“No, but you ‘can’ go to prison for hacking defence facilities, and the cyberterrorism laws include virtual facilities…” He waved around them. “…Like this one. You’re here without an Ident Code, ergo you hacked, ergo you go to prison. The police are already on their way to pick up your meat suit in real life.”

“How the… You don’t know where I am. You’re bluffing.”

“Not so much. Why do you think we’ve kept you online all this time? Our counter intrusion specialists have been at work this whole time. You have pretty decent capabilities, but you’re just one kid. We’re a whole team.”

“So, back to my question.” Neville interrupted. “How did you get in here? How did you even find out about this place? If you cooperate, we can make things a little easier when it comes time to how you serve your sentence.”

“Sentence? I can’t…you can’t… I’m just a kid. You can’t put a kid in prison!”

“You should have thought about that before you hacked a defence facility. Cyberterrorism laws specifically include minors to prevent terrorists from using kids to do their dirty work and get off without consequences. It’s supposed to be a deterrent, but I guess it didn’t work on you.” Marcus shrugged. “Oh well.”

“So kid, help us out and we’ll see what we can do for you.” Neville leaned closer.

“What sort of help?”

“Let’s start with telling us how you found out about this place and how you got in.”

“It’s in The Cop Shop! I found the hook up in The Cop Shop!” He blurted out.

“The…what?” Marcus looked at Neville, puzzled.

Neville nodded knowingly. “The Cop Shop is a place gamers go to swap information the gaming companies supposedly don’t want made public. The name comes from the smart-ass idea that it’s funny to ‘do business’ in the last place people would think to look…the cop shop. What they don’t know is that all the major gaming outfits have accounts there and use it to leak information on their terms. It’s basically a place low-mid level hackers go to get an edge in their games, so if news about us really was there, we’d be flooded with intrusions…” She turned to him. “Care to try again…?”

“Shit.” He said.

“Indeed. It isn’t easy to get in here, and we know more about what’s going on than you do. Either be straight with us…now…or get used to a six by eight cell with one hour of daylight per day.”

The figure seemed to slump. “Okay, fine. I got a message that there was a secret developer training area that required a hack to get into. Sort of a ‘If you’re good enough to get in, you can play the game.’ challenge. It was a private message through an account on The Cop Shop, but it wasn’t posted anywhere. Super ‘no sharing with anyone or you would get banned and shamed from every game the developer makes’ sort of thing. You had to run an account on SOFM, then hack into the Invite Only area without being detected, ‘then’ you had to hack into the developer’s area. That was the challenge. If you made it all the way in, you would get to go up against the developers and could earn custom options that you could take back into the other levels.”

“Okay, that’s a start. We need all the information you were sent, including any verifications you attempted.”

“So this isn’t the developers area?”

Marcus leaned in and looked the figure in the eye. “This is what prison looks like. Remember that.”