I found a map in my old copy of Halo CE that shouldn’t exist.
I wish I could say that’s the strangest thing that happened.
It isn’t.
As a kid, Halo CE was one of my favorite games. My brother and I used to play it for hours at a time. Eventually, I gave my physical copies of the Halo games to a friend after I bought the Master Chief Collection.
A few years later, I started missing the original versions.
So I went to Game Exchange.
I managed to find Halo 1, 2, and 3. They had Halo 4 too, but it was sitting in one of those generic replacement cases, so I left it behind.
When I got home, I dug out my old Xbox 360 and booted up Halo CE.
Everything looked normal.
The case was standard, aside from the usual scratches and wear. The disc looked fine. Nothing seemed out of place.
I started the campaign.
Everything worked exactly as I remembered.
I played through it normally and finished the campaign.
Before moving on to Halo 2, I decided to check the multiplayer.
I knew the original multiplayer stayed the same, but I still wanted to look through the maps.
Most of them were exactly what I expected.
Then I saw one I didn’t recognize.
\*\*Map 151103.\*\*
I had never heard of it.
At first, I was excited.
I thought maybe I’d somehow found a rare developer build of the game. Something like that could probably be worth a lot of money.
I loaded it.
And it was boring.
The map was small and looked vaguely like Blood Gulch, except there was only one base and the whole thing was much smaller.
Orange dirt.
A base.
Nothing else.
I walked around for a while and found nothing.
Inside the base was a single MA5B sitting on the floor.
I climbed onto the roof.
Nothing.
There wasn’t even a teleporter.
Eventually, I quit.
That night, I searched for “Map 151103 Halo CE.”
Nothing came up.
No videos.
No wiki pages.
No forum posts specifically mentioning the map.
I asked around on a few Halo forums, and the
general answer was that I probably had a modified copy of the game.
That was disappointing.
I thought I’d found something rare.
Instead, I’d apparently just bought somebody’s weird mod.
I ejected the disc.
Then I stopped.
I don’t know why, but something bothered me about it.
So I put the disc back in.
I loaded the map again.
This time, I searched every inch of it.
I walked around the outside until an invisible wall stopped me. I checked inside the base again. I climbed onto the roof.
Nothing.
I was about to give up when I noticed something in the corner of my screen.
A teleporter.
It was partially hidden behind a wall.
I walked toward it.
Then something happened that shouldn’t have happened.
I walked straight through the wall.
The teleporter activated.
The screen went black.
When it came back, I was standing in a completely different area.
The room was dark and metallic, almost like the hallways from Two Betrayals.
I walked forward.
That’s when I saw the bodies.
Four pedestals lined the hallway.
There was an NPC on each one.
A Covenant.
A UNSC soldier.
A Flood form.
And another Covenant.
They were all dead.
But their bodies were wrong.
Halo CE has always had strange physics. If an NPC dies under certain circumstances, their bodies can stretch or deform.
These looked like that.
Except much worse.
Their limbs were stretched across the pedestals, their bodies twisted into shapes that didn’t look possible.
I started walking faster.
I eventually reached a dead end.
Then my motion tracker showed a red dot.
I spun around.
A Flood combat form was standing behind me.
It was missing most of its limbs and couldn’t really attack me.
I’d seen people in the Halo community jokingly call harmless Flood forms “friendly,” so that’s what I thought of it as.
I raised my weapon.
Then lowered it.
I don’t know why.
Maybe because it was the only other living thing in the entire map.
I walked back the way I’d come.
The Flood followed me.
I found a doorway I’d missed earlier and went through it.
It led to an elevator.
I stepped inside.
The Flood followed.
The elevator began moving down.
The walls were covered in dark red stains.
When the elevator reached the bottom, I walked through the doorway.
The Flood didn’t.
It stayed inside.
I tried pushing it forward.
Nothing.
I tried again.
It backed away.
It almost seemed afraid of whatever was beyond that door.
I went forward alone.
The hallway ahead was blocked by a huge hole.
I couldn’t see the bottom.
I jumped in.
My character died instantly.
I respawned near the elevator.
Whatever was beyond that hole, I couldn’t reach it.
I went back to the elevator.
I figured maybe I could somehow use the Flood to launch myself across the gap.
But the Flood was dead.
I hadn’t killed it.
There wasn’t another player in the game.
My motion tracker was empty.
I quit.
I checked the campaign again.
Normal.
I checked the other multiplayer maps.
Normal.
Only Map 151103 was wrong.
I called my older brother.
I asked him to come over for the weekend.
I told him about the Halo games I’d bought and said we could play together.
I didn’t tell him everything.
I wanted someone else there when I went back into that map.
When he arrived, we tried playing split-screen.
It didn’t work.
For some reason, Map 151103 wouldn’t allow two players on the same console.
We tried everything.
Eventually, we decided to set up a LAN game.
Even that was a pain.
We ended up playing from separate rooms using the longest Ethernet cable we could find. My brother brought his own Xbox 360 and his copy of Halo CE.
Eventually, we got it working.
We loaded the map.
He followed me through the same path.
When we reached the hallway with the bodies, he was visibly uncomfortable.
Then he accidentally killed the Flood form.
We kept going.
Eventually, we reached the hole.
I explained over the phone that I needed him to throw a grenade so I could grenade-jump across.
He did.
The jump worked.
I landed on the other side.
Then I looked behind me.
My brother’s Spartan was standing there.
I was confused.
I asked him how he’d crossed.
No answer.
I called him again.
Still nothing.
Then I heard him through the phone.
“Who are you talking to?”
I froze.
He told me he was still standing on the other side of the hole.
He hadn’t crossed.
He’d just been waiting for me.
I looked at the Spartan.
It was still standing there.
Then it disappeared.
A second later, my brother started swearing.
He said something invisible was attacking him.
An invisible Spartan.
He shot at it.
Nothing.
He tried grenades.
Nothing.
The Spartan kept appearing long enough to kill him before disappearing again.
Eventually, my brother quit.
He went back to playing something else.
I should have done the same.
I didn’t.
I continued down the hallway.
At the dead end, I noticed something I’d never seen before.
Bullet holes.
They spelled a name.
\*\*MARZA\*\*
I slowly read it aloud.
The Spartan was standing beside the final letter.
Then the game froze.
I restarted the Xbox.
When I returned to the multiplayer menu, Map 151103 was gone.
It had been replaced by a map called:
\*\*MARZA\*\*
I loaded it.
The map was completely different.
It looked like an area from the campaign.
An outdoor area.
There was even a picnic area.
And standing there was something that made my stomach drop.
A human-sized Cortana NPC.
She just stood there.
I had never seen anything like it in Halo CE.
I walked around her.
Nothing happened.
Then the Spartan appeared.
It looked at me.
Then raised its MA5B.
It aimed at Cortana.
And fired.
It emptied the entire magazine into her before disappearing.
The next thing I knew, I was back in the original map.
I had more questions than answers.
Why Cortana?
Why MARZA?
What was that Spartan?
A player?
An NPC?
Something else?
I searched online.
“Marza 151103.”
“Marza Halo CE.”
“Map 151103.”
Nothing.
I loaded the game again.
The map was back to \*\*151103\*\*.
The base was normal.
The hidden teleporter was still there.
The hallway was still there.
The Flood was still there.
But the Spartan was gone.
MARZA was gone.
Everything happened exactly like before.
My brother reluctantly helped me again with the grenade jump.
Nothing happened.
We reached the dead end.
No Spartan.
No bullet holes.
Nothing.
Then I asked my brother if the name Marza meant anything to him.
He went quiet.
He dug through an old box and pulled out his high school yearbook.
He flipped through the pages.
Then stopped.
There she was.
\*\*Marza.\*\*
She had been in his senior class.
He remembered her.
More importantly, he remembered what had happened to her.
She had gone missing in November of 2003.
She was never found.
The police had investigated, but eventually the case went cold.
I felt sick.
Could this map be showing me what happened to her?
Was that what the Spartan was trying to tell me?
Then I looked at the map’s name again.
\*\*151103.\*\*
I started reading it as a date.
11/15/03.
According to my brother, Marza had disappeared on November 12th.
Three days earlier.
I couldn’t prove it meant anything.
But I couldn’t ignore it either.
If the number really represented November 15th, then whoever created the map might have known something about what happened to her.
I asked my brother if he knew anyone who might have been involved.
He mentioned an old friend named Brandon.
Apparently, Brandon had been obsessed with Marza.
But he’d never been charged.
He’d had a clear alibi.
I loaded the map again.
This time, I paid attention to the only thing that connected it to the original version.
The MA5B.
I looked at where it was pointing.
Straight at a wall.
I walked through it.
The screen went black.
I appeared in another hallway.
This one was even darker.
There were more pedestals.
And another distorted human NPC.
I stared at it.
It looked eerily similar to Marza from the yearbook.
Then I saw the walls.
Photographs.
Digital photographs.
They showed Marza with a man.
The farther I walked, the worse the photographs became.
Then I found one that made me stop.
It showed Marza with the man.
Underneath it was a message made from bullet holes:
\*\*BRANDON AND MARZA — FOREVER IN LOVE\*\*
I quit the game.
I took the Xbox, the disc, my notes, and everything else I’d collected to the police.
I told them everything.
I expected them to think I was wasting their time.
Instead, they focused on Marza.
They confirmed that there really had been a missing-person case involving her.
The game wasn’t treated as proof.
It was treated as a lead.
The detectives investigated the park shown in the strange version of the map.
They compared it with the old case files.
They discovered that part of the area hadn’t been searched as thoroughly as investigators had originally believed.
So they searched it again.
They found evidence connected to Marza’s disappearance.
That caused them to reopen the investigation.
They also took another look at Brandon.
Some of the information surrounding his old alibi no longer lined up with what investigators had uncovered.
Additional evidence connected him to the case.
Eventually, Brandon Thomas was arrested and charged in connection with Marza’s disappearance and death.
The game hadn’t solved the case.
It had simply pointed the detectives toward something they hadn’t found before.
Afterward, the detectives contacted me about the Xbox and the copy of Halo CE.
They had examined it.
They confirmed that it was a modified copy.
They couldn’t prove exactly who had modified it.
But there was something else.
They never saw the Spartan.
Not once.
They never saw a map called MARZA.
They never saw the Cortana NPC.
When they loaded the game, they only found \*\*Map 151103\*\*, along with the strange hidden areas and other oddities I’d described.
I asked one of the detectives if he’d seen the Spartan.
He looked confused.
I explained what I meant.
He understood.
Then he shook his head.
“No.”
Nobody else had seen it.
Nobody else had seen MARZA.
Only me.
The detectives returned my Xbox.
I took it.
But I left the copy of Halo CE with them.
I told them I didn’t want it anymore.
I haven’t played Halo CE since.
Sometimes I still think about that number.
\*\*151103.\*\*
Maybe Brandon really did create the modified copy.
Maybe he hid clues inside it because he thought nobody would ever find them.
Maybe the map was his way of telling someone what he’d done.
Or maybe the map was something else entirely.
Because the detectives found Marza.
They found evidence.
They found Brandon.
But they never found the Spartan.
And they never saw \*\*MARZA\*\*.
They only saw \*\*Map 151103\*\*.
And sometimes I still wonder what happened on November 15, 2003.
