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Phase Three

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

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The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games.

—Eugene Jarvis, creator of Defender

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I WAS STARING out the classroom window and daydreaming of adventure when I

spotted the flying saucer.

I blinked and looked again—but it was still out there, a shiny chrome disc

zigzagging around in the sky. My eyes struggled to track the object through a series of

increasingly fast, impossibly sharp turns that would have juiced a human being, had

there been any aboard. The disc streaked toward the distant horizon, then came to an

instantaneous stop just above it. It hovered there motionless over the distant tree line

for a few seconds, as if scanning the area beneath it with an invisible beam, before it

abruptly launched itself skyward again, making another series of physics-defying

changes to its course and speed.

I tried to keep my cool. I tried to remain skeptical. I reminded myself that I was a

man of science, even if I did usually get a C in it.

I looked at it again. I still couldn’t tell what it was, but I knew what it wasn’t—it

wasn’t a meteor. Or a weather balloon, or swamp gas, or ball lightning. No, the

unidentified flying object I was staring at with my own two eyes was most definitely

not of this earth.

My first thought was: Holy fucking shit.

Followed immediately by: I can’t believe it’s finally happening.

You see, ever since the first day of kindergarten, I had been hoping and waiting for

some mind-blowingly fantastic, world-altering event to finally shatter the endless

monotony of my public education. I had spent hundreds of hours gazing out at the

calm, conquered suburban landscape surrounding my school, silently yearning for the

outbreak of a zombie apocalypse, a freak accident that would give me super powers, or

perhaps the sudden appearance of a band of time-traveling kleptomaniac dwarves.

I would estimate that approximately one-third of these dark daydreams of mine had

involved the unexpected arrival of beings from another world.

Of course, I’d never believed it would really happen. Even if alien visitors did decide

to drop by this utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, no self-respecting

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been too disturbed by its contents, and what they’d seemed to imply about the author’s

mental state. So I’d put the old notebook back where I found it and tried to forget that

it even existed—and until a few seconds ago, I had succeeded.

But now I couldn’t seem to think about anything else.

I felt a sudden compulsion to run out of the school, drive home, and find it. It

wouldn’t take long. My house was only a few minutes away.

I glanced over at the exit, and the man guarding it, Mr. Sayles, our elderly

Integrated Mathematics II teacher. He had a silver buzz cut, thick horn-rimmed

glasses, and wore the same monochromatic outfit he always did: black loafers, black

slacks, a white short-sleeve dress shirt, and a black clip-on necktie. He’d been teaching

at this high school for over forty-five years now, and the old yearbook photos in the

library were proof that he’d been rocking this same retro ensemble the entire time. Mr.

S was finally retiring this year, which was a good thing, because he appeared to have

run out of shits to give sometime in the previous century. Today, he’d spent the first

five minutes going over our homework assignment, then given us the rest of the

period to work on it, while he shut off his hearing aid and did his crosswords. But he

would still spot me if I tried to sneak out.

My eyes moved to the ancient clock embedded in the lime green brick wall above

the obsolete chalkboard. With its usual lack of pity, it informed me there were still

thirty-two minutes remaining until the bell.

There was no way I could take thirty-two more minutes of this. After what I’d just

seen, I’d be lucky if I managed to keep my shit together for another thirty-two

seconds.

Off to my left, Douglas Knotcher was currently engaged in his daily humiliation of

Casey Cox, the shy, acne-plagued kid unfortunate enough to be seated in front of him.

Knotcher usually limited himself to lobbing verbal insults at the poor guy, but today

he’d decided to go old-school and lob spitballs at him instead. Knotcher had a stack of

moist projectiles piled on his desk like cannonballs, and he was currently firing them at

the back of Casey’s head, one after another. The back of the poor kid’s hair was

already damp with spit from Knotcher’s previous attacks. A couple of Knotcher’s pals

were watching from the back of the room, and they snickered each time he nailed

Casey with another projectile, egging him on.

It drove me nuts when Knotcher bullied Casey like this—which, I suspected, was

one of the reasons Knotcher enjoyed doing it so much. He knew I couldn’t do a damn

thing about it.

I glanced at Mr. Sayles, but he was still lost in his crossword, clueless as always—a

fact that Knotcher took advantage of on a daily basis. And on a daily basis, I had to

resist the urge to knock his teeth down his throat.

Doug Knotcher and I had managed to avoid each other, for the most part, ever

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since “the Incident” back in junior high. Until this year, when a cruel act of fate had

landed us both in the same math class. Seated in adjacent rows, no less. It was almost as

if the universe wanted my last semester of high school to be as hellish as possible.

That would have also explained why my ex-girlfriend, Ellen Adams, was in this

class, too. Three rows to my right and two rows back, sitting just beyond the reach of

my peripheral vision.

Ellen was my first love, and we’d lost our virginity to each other. It had been nearly

two years since she’d dumped me for some wrestler from a neighboring school, but

every time I saw those freckles across the bridge of her nose—or caught sight of her

tossing that curly red hair out of her eyes—I felt my heart breaking all over again. I

usually spent the entire class period trying to forget she was in the room.

Being forced to sit between my mortal enemy and my ex-girlfriend every afternoon

made seventh-period math feel like my own private Kobayashi Maru, a brutal no-win

scenario designed to test my emotional fortitude.

Thankfully fate had balanced out the nightmare equation slightly by placing my two

best friends in this class, too. If Cruz and Diehl hadn’t been assigned here, I probably

would’ve snapped and started hallucinating shit midway through my first week.

I glanced back at them again. Diehl, who was tall and thin, and Cruz, who was short

and stocky, both shared the same first name, Michael. Ever since grade school I had

been calling them by their last names to avoid confusion. The Mikes were still engaged

in the same whispered conversation they’d been having earlier, before I’d zoned out

and started seeing things—a debate over the “coolest melee weapon in the history of

cinema.” I tried to focus in on their voices again now.

“Sting wasn’t even really a sword,” Diehl was saying. “It was more like a glow-in- the-dark Hobbit butter knife, used to spread jam on scones and lembas bread and shit.”

Cruz rolled his eyes. “ ‘Your love of the halflings’ leaf has clearly slowed your

mind,’ ” he quoted. “Sting was an Elvish blade, forged in Gondolin in the First Age! It

could cut through almost anything! And its blade only glowed when it detected the

presence of orcs or goblins nearby. What does Mjolnir detect? Fake accents and frosted

hair?”

I wanted to tell them what I’d just seen, but best friends or not, there was no way in

hell they’d believe me. They’d think of it as another symptom of their pal Zack’s

psychological instability.

And maybe it was, too.

“Thor doesn’t need to detect his enemies so he can run off and hide in his little

Hobbit hole!” Diehl whispered. “Mjolnir is powerful enough to destroy mountains,

and it can also emit energy blasts, create force fields, and summon lightning. The

hammer also always returns to Thor’s hand after he throws it, even if it has to tear

through an entire planet to get back to him! And only Thor can wield it!” He leaned

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probably life elsewhere. But given the vast size and age of the universe, I also knew

how astronomically unlikely it was we would ever make contact with it, much less

within the narrow window of my own lifetime. We were all probably stuck here for

the duration, on the third rock from our sun. Boldly going extinct.

I felt a sharp pain in my jaw and realized I was clenching my teeth—hard enough to

crack my back molars. With some effort, I unclenched them. Then I glanced back at

Ellen, to see if she was watching all of this. She was staring at Casey with a helpless

expression, and her eyes were filled with pity.

That was what finally pushed me over the edge.

“Zack, what are you doing?” I heard Diehl ask in a panicked whisper. “Sit down!”

I glanced down. Without realizing it, I’d gotten up from my desk. My eyes were

still locked on Knotcher and Casey.

“Yeah, stay out of it!” Cruz whispered over my other shoulder. “Come on, man.”

But by that point, a red film of rage had already slipped down across my vision.

When I reached Knotcher, I didn’t do what I wanted to, which was to grab him by

his hair and slam his face into his desktop as hard as I could, again and again.

Instead, I reached down and scooped up the soggy pile of gray spitballs resting on

the floor behind Casey’s chair. I used both hands to pack them all together in a single

wet ball, then slapped it down directly on the top of Knotcher’s head. It made an

extremely satisfying splat sound.

Knotcher jumped up and spun around to face his attacker, but he froze when he saw

my face staring back at him. His eyes went wide, and he seemed to turn slightly pale.

A collective “Ooooooh!” emanated from our classmates. Everyone knew what had

happened between me and Knotcher back in junior high, and they were all electrified

by the possibility of a rematch. Seventh period Integrated Math had just gotten a hell

of a lot more exciting.

Knotcher reached up and clawed the wet ball of chewed-up napkins off his head.

Then he hurled it angrily across the room, unintentionally pelting half a dozen people.

We locked eyes. I noticed a rivulet of Knotcher’s own spittle dripping down the left

side of his face. He wiped it away, still keeping his eyes on me.

“Finally decided to stick up for your boyfriend, Lightman?” he muttered, doing a

poor job of concealing the unsteadiness in his voice.

I bared my teeth and lunged a step forward, cocking my right fist back. It had the

desired effect. Knotcher didn’t just flinch—he lurched backward, tripping over his

own chair and nearly falling to the floor. But then he righted himself and faced off

with me again, his cheeks now flushed in embarrassment.

The classroom was now dead silent, save for the incessant click of the electric wall

clock, ticking off the seconds.

Do it, I thought. Give me an excuse. Throw a punch.

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WHEN I PULLED into the half-deserted strip mall where “the Base” was located, I

parked a few spots away from my boss Ray’s gas-guzzling pride and joy, a red 1964

Ford Galaxie with a faded bumper sticker that read: STARSHIP CAPTAINS DO IT ON

IMPULSE.

As usual, the rest of the customer parking lot was empty, except for a small cluster of

cars in front of THAI, the generically named Thai food restaurant at the other end of

the strip mall, where Ray and I ordered copious amounts of takeout. We’d nicknamed

the place “Thai Fighter,” because the capital H on their sign had a circular bulge at its

center that made the letter resemble an imperial fighter with Twin Ion Engines.

The sign mounted over the entrance of Starbase Ace was a bit fancier. Ray had

designed it to look like a real Starbase was bursting out of the building’s brick façade. It

had cost him a fortune, but it did look cool as hell.

As I pushed through the front door, the electronic chime Ray had rigged up to it

activated, playing a sliding-door sound effect from the original Star Trek TV series,

making it sound like I was walking onto the bridge of the Enterprise. It still made me

smile every time I arrived at work—even today.

As I walked into the store, a pair of toy laser turrets mounted on the ceiling swiveled

around to track me, activated by their primitive motion sensors. Ray had taped a sign

to the wall beside them that read WARNING: ANYONE CAUGHT SHOPLIFTING WILL BE

VAPORIZED BY OUR TURBO-LASERS!

Ray was in his usual spot behind the counter, hunched over “Big Bootay,” his

ancient overclocked gaming PC. His left hand danced across its keyboard while he

clicked the mouse with his right.

“Zack is back for the attack!” Ray bellowed, keeping his eyes on the game. “How

was school, my man?”

“Uneventful,” I lied, joining him behind the counter. “How’s business today?”

“Nice and slow, just like we like it,” he said. “Dost thou care for a Funyun?”

He proffered a giant bag of the simulated onion rings, and I took one to be polite.

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was anyone I could have told about the Glaive Fighter, it was him. Ray seemed to

believe that everything happening in the world was somehow connected to Roswell,

Area 51, or Hangar 18. He’d told me on numerous occasions that he believed aliens

had already made first contact with humanity decades ago, and that our leaders were

still covering it up all these years later because “the sheeple of Earth” weren’t ready to

hear the truth yet.

But UFO cover-ups and alien abductions were one thing. Seeing a fictional alien

spacecraft from a bestselling videogame series buzzing your town made even the

craziest Roswell conspiracy theories seem sane by comparison. Besides, how was I

supposed to walk over to Ray and tell him with a straight face that I’d seen a Sobrukai

fighter buzzing our town—when he was, at that very moment, doing battle with that

very same fictional alien race?

I walked over to get a better view of his huge monitor. Ray was playing the same

videogame he’d been playing pretty much nonstop for the past few years—Terra Firma,

a wildly popular first-person shooter published by Chaos Terrain, the same developer

behind Armada. Both games shared the same near-future alien invasion storyline, in

which Earth was being attacked by the “Sobrukai,” a race of ill-tempered

anthropomorphic squid-like creatures from Tau Ceti V who were hell-bent on

exterminating all of humanity, for one of the usual bullshit reasons—they wanted our

sweet-ass M-Class planet, and sharing shit just wasn’t in their cephalopod nature.

Like nearly every race of evil alien invaders in the history of science fiction, the

Sobrukai were somehow technologically advanced enough to construct huge warships

capable of crossing interstellar space, and yet still not smart enough to terraform a

lifeless world to suit their needs, instead of going through the huge hassle of trying to

conquer one that was already inhabited—especially one inhabited by billions of nuke- wielding apes who generally don’t cotton to strangers being on their land. No, the

Sobrukai just had to have Earth for some reason, and they were determined to Kill All

Humans before they took possession. Luckily for us, like so many made-up evil alien

invaders before them, the Sobrukai also seemed intent on exterminating us as slowly

and inefficiently as possible. Instead of just wiping out humanity with a meteor or a

killer virus or a few old-fashioned long-range nuclear weapons, the squids had opted to

wage a prolonged World War II–style air and ground war against us—while somehow

allowing all of their advanced weapons, propulsion, and communications technology

to fall into their primitive enemy’s hands.

In both Armada and Terra Firma, you played a human recruit in the Earth Defense

Alliance, tasked with using a variety of ground-based combat drones to fight off the

invasion. Each drone in the EDA’s arsenal was designed to serve as a direct match for a

similar type of drone used by the alien enemy.

Terra Firma focused on humanity’s ground war against the Sobrukai after their

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drones had reached Earth. Armada was an aerospace combat sim released the following

year, allowing players to remotely control humanity’s global stockpile of defense

drones, and use them to battle the Sobrukai invaders out in space and over the

besieged cities of Earth. Since their release, Terra Firma and Armada had become two of

the most popular multiplayer action games in the world. I’d played TF religiously

when it came out—until Chaos Terrain released Armada the following year, and then

it had become my primary videogame obsession. I still played Terra Firma with Cruz

and Diehl a few times a week—usually in return for them agreeing to play an Armada

mission with me.

Ray also frequently coerced me into playing TF with him here at work, so my

infantry drone skills were still sharp. This was essential, because in Terra Firma, the size

and power of the drones you were allowed to control during each mission was based

on your overall combat skill rating. Newbie players were only authorized to operate

the smallest and cheapest combat drones in the EDA’s arsenal. Once you increased in

rank and skill, you were allowed to pilot increasingly bigger and more advanced drones

—Spartan hover tanks, Nautiloid attack submarines, Sentinels (ten-foot-tall super- ATHIDs with more firepower), and the EDA’s largest and most impressive weapon,

the Titan Warmech—a giant humanoid robot that looked like something out of an old

Japanese anime.

Ray happened to be controlling a Warmech at that very moment, and he was in

trouble. I watched as a horde of alien Spider Fighters closed in on him. His mech

finally succumbed to the incoming barrage of laser fire and toppled backward into a

large tenement building, demolishing it. He and I both winced—in Terra Firma, players

got penalized for all of the property damage caused by their drones in combat—

intentional or otherwise.

Although the game’s backstory embraced a lot of tired alien invasion tropes, it

subverted many of them, too. For example, the Sobrukai weren’t actually invading

Earth in person—they were using drones to do it. And humanity had constructed its

own stockpile of drones to repel them. So all of the aerospace fighters, mechs, tanks,

subs, and ground troops used by both sides were remotely controlled war machines—

each one operated by an alien or human who was physically located somewhere far

from the battlefield.

From a purely tactical standpoint, using drones made a hell of a lot more sense than

using manned (or aliened) ships and vehicles to wage an interplanetary war. Why risk

the lives of your best pilots by sending them into combat? Now whenever I watched a

Star Wars film, I found myself wondering how the Empire had the technology to make

long-distance holographic phone calls between planets light-years apart, and yet no one

had figured out how to make a remote-controlled TIE Fighter or X-Wing yet.

A warning message flashed on Ray’s HUD: YOUR DRONE HAS BEEN DESTROYED!

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Then his display went dark for a second before a new message flashed on his HUD,

informing him that he had just been given control of a new drone. But since all of his

unit’s larger drones and tanks had already been destroyed, Ray was forced to take

control of the only thing they had left. An ATHID—Armored Tactical Humanoid

Infantry Drone.

From the neck down, an ATHID looked similar to the original Terminator, after all

of Arnie’s cyborg flesh got burned away, leaving only its armored chrome skeleton

underneath. But in place of a human-shaped head, each ATHID had a stereoscopic

camera encased inside an armored acrylic dome, giving it a vaguely insect-like

appearance. Every ATHID was armed with a Gauss mini-gun mounted on each

forearm, a pair of shoulder-mounted missile launchers, and a laser cannon embedded in

its chest plate.

I watched over Ray’s shoulder as he used his ATHID’s twin mini-guns to mow

down an onslaught of Sobrukai Spider Fighters—eight-legged antipersonnel robots—

that were attacking him on the roof of a burning tenement building, somewhere near

the center of the besieged city he was helping defend. He was bobbing his head in

time to his favorite TF battle soundtrack song, “Vital Signs” by Rush. Ray claimed

that its unique time signature matched up perfectly with the alien Spider Fighter

drones’ erratic swarming patterns, making it easier for him to anticipate their

movements and rate of attack. He also claimed that each of the other songs on Rush’s

Moving Pictures album was perfect for battling a different Sobrukai drone. Personally,

I’d always assumed this was just an excuse he’d concocted for playing that same album

on a continuous loop, day after day.

On Ray’s monitor, dozens of Sobrukai troopships were descending from the sky.

These massive, gunmetal gray octahedrons were what the enemy used to deploy their

ground forces once they reached Earth’s orbit. Each one had automated sentry guns

mounted all over its heavily armored hull, which was nearly invulnerable to laser fire.

Of course, in typical videogame fashion, these ships had been engineered with a

glaring weak spot: their engines were unshielded and vulnerable to attack—a fact I

knew well from playing Armada. When one of these diamond-shaped troopships made

landfall, it would impact with enough velocity to bury its lower half into the surface,

like a giant spike. Then the pyramid-shaped top half would open like an enormous

four-petaled metal flower, and the thousands of Sobrukai drones packed inside it

would pour out, like an army of newborn insects bursting from a broken egg sac,

intent on devouring everything in sight.

In the distance, a swarm of Sobrukai Glaive Fighters streaked across the sky, banking

in unison to change course, like a school of piranha in search of prey. Viewed from

above, the Glaive’s symmetrical fuselage resembled the blade of a double-headed axe,

but seen edge-on, its profile distinctly resembled that of a flying saucer from an old sci-

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the legs of his jeans; then he gave me an excited grin.

“Hey, guess what came in today?” he asked. Then he produced a large box from

underneath the counter and set it in front of me.

If I’d been a cartoon character, my eyes would have bulged out of their sockets.

It was a brand-new Armada Interceptor Flight Control System—the most advanced

(and expensive) videogame controller ever made.

“No way!” I whispered, examining the photos and stats printed on its glossy black

box. “I thought these things weren’t supposed to hit the market until next month!”

“It looks like Chaos Terrain decided to ship them early,” he said, rubbing his hands

together excitedly. “Want to unbox this bad boy?”

I nodded my head vigorously, and Ray grabbed a packing knife. He cut the box

open and then instructed me to hold on to its sides as he pulled out the Styrofoam

cube housing the controller’s various components. A few seconds later, everything was

freed from the packaging and laid out on the glass countertop in front of us.

The Armada Interceptor Flight Control System (IFCS) contained an Interceptor

pilot helmet (incorporating a set of built-in VR goggles, noise-canceling headphones,

and a retractable microphone) and a two-piece HOTAS (Hands-On Throttle and

Stick) rig, comprised of an all-metal force-feedback flight stick and a separate dual- throttle controller with a built-in weapons control panel. The stick, throttle, and

weapons panel all bristled with ergonomic buttons, triggers, indicators, mode selectors,

rotary dials, and eight-way hat studs, each of which could be configured to give you

total control of your Armada Interceptor’s flight, navigation, and weapons systems.

“You likey, Zack?” Ray asked, after watching me drool over it for a while.

“Ray, I want to marry this thing.”

“We’ve got over a dozen more back in the stockroom,” he said. “Maybe we can

build a display pyramid out of them or something.”

I picked up the helmet and hefted it, impressed by its weight and detail. It looked

and felt like a real fighter pilot helmet, and its Oculus Rift components were state-of- the-art. (I had a half-decent VR headset at home that Ray had gifted me, but it was a

few years old, and the display resolution had increased drastically since then.)

“These new helmets can read your thoughts, too,” Ray joked. “But you have to

think in Russian.”

I laughed and set the helmet back on the counter, resisting the urge to try it on.

Then I reached out and rested my left hand on the throttle controller while I wrapped

my right hand around the cold metal of the attached flight stick. Both seemed like a

perfect fit, as if they’d been machined to match my hands. I’d been playing Armada for

years, and the whole time I’d been using a cheap plastic flight stick and throttle

controller. I’d had no idea what I’d been missing. I’d coveted an IFCS ever since I

heard they were coming out on the Armada forums. But the price tag was somewhere

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WHEN I GOT back home, my mother’s car was parked in the driveway. This was a

pleasant surprise, because she’d had to work a lot of overtime at the hospital this past

year, and most nights she didn’t get home until I’d already crashed.

But knowing she was home also put me on edge, because she’d always been able to

tell when something was bothering me. When I was younger, I was convinced she

possessed some sort of mutant maternal telepathy that allowed her to read my mind,

especially when there was crazy shit going on inside it.

I found my mother stretched out on the living-room sofa, with Muffit curled up at

her feet, watching the latest episode of Doctor Who, one of her many televised

addictions. Neither of them heard me come in, so I set my Armada controller box on

the stairs and then just stood there for a moment, watching my mother watch her

show.

Pamela Lightman (née Crandall) was the coolest woman I’d ever met, as well as the

toughest. She reminded me a lot of Sarah Connor or Ellen Ripley—sure, she might

have a few issues, but she was also the kind of single mom who would strap on heavy

artillery and mow down killer cyborgs, if that was what it took to protect her offspring.

My mother was also ridiculously beautiful. I know people are supposed to say things

like that about their mothers, but in my case it happened to be a fact. Few young men

know the Oedipal torment of growing up with an insanely hot, perpetually single

mom. Watching men constantly flip out over her looks before they’d even bothered to

get to know her had made me faintly disgusted by my own gender—as if I didn’t

already have enough psychological baggage strapped to my luggage rack.

Raising me all by herself had been difficult for my mother, in lots of ways that

probably weren’t obvious to most people. For one thing, she’d done it without any

assistance from her own parents. She’d lost her own father to cancer when she was still

in grade school, and then her ultra-religious mother had disowned her for getting

knocked up while she was still a senior in high school and then marrying the no-good

Nintendo nerd who’d defiled her.

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My mom had told me that her mother only tried to reconcile with her once, a few

months after my father died. It didn’t go well. She’d made the mistake of telling my

mom his death was “a blessing in disguise” because it meant that now she could find

herself a “respectable husband—one with some prospects.”

After that, my mom had disowned her.

I secretly worried that one of the toughest things for my mother was the simple

necessity of being forced to look at my face every day. I looked just like my father, and

so far, the similarity had only seemed to increase as I got older. Now I was nearing the

age he’d been at the time of his death, and I tried not to wonder how awful it must be

for my mom to see her dead husband’s doppelganger smiling at her from across the

breakfast table every morning. Part of me even wondered if that might be why she’d

become such a workaholic the past few years.

My mom had never played the part of the lonely widow—she went out dancing

with her friends all the time, and I knew she dated occasionally, too. But she always

seemed to end her relationships before they got serious. I’d never bothered to ask her

why. The reason was obvious—she was still in love with my father, or at least with the

memory of him.

In my younger years, I’d drawn a kind of perverse satisfaction from knowing how

much she missed him, because it was proof my parents really had been in love, but

now that I’d grown up a little, I was beginning to worry she might stay single forever.

I didn’t like the idea of her living here all alone in this house after I graduated and

moved out.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, speaking softly so as not to startle her.

“Oh hey, honey!” she said, muting the TV and sitting up slowly. “I didn’t hear you

come in.” She pointed at her right cheek, and I dutifully went over and planted a kiss

there. “Thank you!” she said, ruffling my hair. Then she patted the couch beside her

and I sat down, pulling Muffit onto my lap. “How was your day, kiddo?” she asked.

“Not too bad,” I said, punctuating the lie with a casual shrug to help sell it. “How

was your day, Ma?”

“Oh, it was pretty good,” she replied, mimicking my voice—and my casual shrug.

“Glad to hear it,” I said, even though I suspected she was fibbing, too. She spent her

days taking care of cancer patients, many of them terminally ill. I wasn’t sure how she

ever managed to have a good day at that job.

“You’re not working late tonight?” I asked. “It’s a Christmas miracle.”

She laughed at our old family joke. Everything was a Christmas miracle at our

house, all year round.

“I decided to take a night off.” She swung her feet off the couch and turned to face

me. “You hungry, babe? Because I’m craving cinnamon French toast.” She stood up.

“How about it, kid? Feel like having some breakfast-for-dinner with your mom?”

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decided that I don’t want to buy anything, sell anything, or process anything.”

She frowned and began to shake her head in protest, but I kept going.

“You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that,” I went on. “I don’t want to buy

anything sold or processed, I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed—”

“—or process anything sold, bought, or processed,” she finished, cutting me off.

“Who do you think you’re messing with? Lloyd, Lloyd, all-null-and-void?”

“Busted,” I said, raising my hands in a gesture of guilt. “That’s what you get for

making me watch that flick seven gajillion times.”

She folded her arms.

“Zack, there’s more than enough money set aside in your college fund to cover four

years of tuition at most schools. You can go anywhere you want—and study anything

you want. Do you know how lucky you are?”

Yep. I was lucky, all right. My mom had started that college fund for me when I

was still just a baby, using some of the settlement money from my father’s death that

was left over after she bought our house. There had been enough to cover her tuition

for nursing school, too.

Lucky, right?

Want to hear another stroke of great luck? My father’s corpse was so badly burned

in the explosion that the coroner had to use his dental records to identify the body,

saving my mom from having to go to the morgue and identify his corpse herself.

How much good fortune can one family stand?

“Did you think over what we discussed last time?” she asked. “You promised to

consider going to college to study how to make videogames, like Mike Cruz is

planning to do?”

“I’m good at playing videogames, Mom,” I said. “Not at making them. You need to

be really good at programming or digital art, and I suck at both.” I sighed and looked

at my feet.

“The important thing is that you love gaming,” she said. “You’d figure out the rest.

You’d enjoy it.” She smiled and touched my face. “You know I’m right. You’ve got

gamer geek DNA on both sides.”

It was true. You’d never know it to look at her, but my mom was a hardcore gamer

in her day, too. She’d had a serious World of Warcraft habit for a few years. She was

more of a casual gamer now, but she played Terra Firma missions with me sometimes.

“Aren’t there people who get paid to play the videogames to test them out?”

“Yeah, they’re called quality-assurance testers,” I said. “The job sounds good in

theory, but in reality it sucks. The pay is crap, and all you do is play the same level of

the same game over and over thousands of times to try and find bugs in the code. That

would drive me nuts.”

She sighed and nodded. “Yeah, me too.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial

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I LOCKED THE door and pressed my back to it, and with my mother’s warning about

the inescapable nature of the future still echoing in my ears, I scanned the interior of

my room, for the first time feeling a sense of shame over how I’d chosen to decorate

it. The posters on my walls, the books and comics and toys on my shelves—nearly all

of them had once belonged to my late father. The room couldn’t even be classified as a

shrine to his memory, because I didn’t even remember the guy. This was more like a

museum exhibit—a really sad, fucked-up one, devoted to a man I’d never even

known, and never would.

No wonder my mother avoided coming in here. Seeing the décor probably broke

her heart two or three different ways.

A small fleet of model spacecraft hung suspended from the ceiling on fishing line,

and as I crossed my room, I brushed each of them with my fingertips, setting them in

motion one after the other. First the starship Enterprise, then the Sulaco from Aliens,

followed by an X-Wing, a Y-Wing, the Millennium Falcon, a Veritech Fighter from

Robotech—and finally, a carefully painted Gunstar from The Last Starfighter.

I pulled the window shades down, plunging the room into darkness save for a

narrow shaft of moonlight that fell on my battered leather gaming chair in the corner,

casting it in an otherworldly glow. As I collapsed into the chair, I sang the first five bars

of “Duel of the Fates” to myself in anticipation: Dunt-dunt-dah-dah-dah!

I grabbed my dusty game console and disconnected my old plastic flight stick and

throttle controllers, along with my bulky first-generation VR headset, which was held

together with copious amounts of black electrical tape. Once the old gear was set aside,

I connected the various components of my new Interceptor Flight Control System and

positioned them around my chair, placing the heavy metal flight stick on an old milk

crate in front of me, directly between my knees, with the separate throttle controller

on the flat armrest of my chair, within easy reach of my left hand.

This setup was supposed to re-create the exact layout of the Interceptor cockpit

controls seen in the game. My own private starship simulator. Sitting there inside it, I

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remembered building a spaceship cockpit out of couch pillows in front of the

television when I was a kid, in an effort to make the experience of playing Star Fox on

my Nintendo 64 more realistic. I’d had the idea after seeing some kids do it in an old

Atari commercial for Cosmic Ark on one of my father’s videotapes.

Once I had my new controllers arranged properly, I synced my phone to the

Bluetooth headphones built into my new Armada VR flight helmet. Then I cued up

my Raid the Arcade playlist—my digital re-creation of an old analog mixtape I’d found

among my father’s things with that title carefully printed on its label in my father’s

handwriting. The title led me to assume it was a compilation of his favorite gaming

music, and I’d grown up listening to those songs while I played videogames, too. As a

result, listening to my father’s old digital combat compilation had become an essential

part of my Armada gaming ritual. Trying to play without my Raid the Arcade playlist on

in the background invariably threw off my aim and my rhythm. That’s why I made

sure I had it cued up before the start of every mission.

I put on the faux Interceptor pilot helmet and adjusted its built-in noise-canceling

headphones, which completely covered each of my ears. After I adjusted the VR

goggles to make sure they fit snugly over my eyes, I thumbed the small button that

extended the helmet’s retractable microphone—a completely pointless, yet undeniably

cool feature. Then I retracted and extended the microphone a few more times, just to

hear the sound it made.

Once the game finished loading, I spent a few minutes customizing the button

configuration on my new throttle and flight-stick controllers, then logged on to the

Armada multiplayer server.

I immediately checked the EDA pilot rankings, to make sure my ranking hadn’t

slipped since my last login. But my so-cheesy-it-was-cool call sign was still there, in

sixth place. I’d held that spot for over two months now, but a part of me was always

still shocked to see it there, listed among the top ten, alongside the game’s most famous

—and infamous—players. I scanned the familiar collection of call signs, listed in what

had now become a familiar order:

01. RedJive

02. MaxJenius

03. Withnailed

04. Viper

05. Rostam

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06. IronBeagle

07. Whoadie

08. CrazyJi

09. AtomicMom

10. Kushmaster5000

I had been seeing these ten call signs almost every night for years, but I didn’t

actually know who any of those people really were—or where they lived, either. Aside

from a few casual acquaintances at school and work, Cruz and Diehl were the only

Armada pilots I’d ever met in real life.

The game had over nine million active players in dozens of countries, so clawing my

way up into the top ten had been no easy feat. Even with what I’ve been told is a

natural talent for videogames, it had still taken me over three years of daily practice

before I even managed to crack the top one hundred. Once I’d crossed that threshold,

I finally seemed to find my groove, and in the months that followed, I made a

meteoric rise into the top ten while also rising up the ranks of the Earth Defense

Alliance, earning one field promotion after another until I was promoted all the way

up to lieutenant.

I knew Armada was only a videogame, but I’d never been one of the “best of the

best” at anything before, and my accomplishment gave me a real sense of pride.

Admittedly, all the time I’d had to devote to the game had shaved a full point off my

grade average, and it had probably cost me my relationship with Ellen, too. But I’d

already vowed to turn over a new leaf, I reminded myself. After tonight’s mission, no

more Armada for at least two full weeks—even if that meant sacrificing my position in

the top ten. No great loss, I told myself. The higher you were ranked, the more trash

talk, friendly fire, and accusations of cheating you had to endure from the other

players.

Case in point—the Armada pilots currently ranked in the top five were easily the

most loathed players in the game’s brief history. This was partly because the top five

ranked pilots had the honor of “painting” their drones with their own customized

multicolored designs, while the rest of us flew plain old stainless steel ones. That was

how the top five had earned their nickname “The Flying Circus.”

A lot of posters in the Chaos Terrain forums seemed to believe the top five pilots

were just too good to be real players, and that they had to be NPC bots or Chaos

Terrain employees. Others theorized they were an elitist gamer clan, because the five

of them never responded to messages or in-game chat requests. Of course, that may

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have been because N00bs were always accusing them of cheating, by using some sort

of client hack to auto-aim or give their shields infinite energy. But it was all bullshit

sour grapes. I’d been going head-to-head with RedJive (aka “The Red Baron”) and

the other members of the Flying Circus on the free-for-all death-match servers for

over a year now, and I’d never once seen any sign they were cheating. They were just

better than everyone else. In fact, studying their moves and learning from them was

how I’d climbed into the top ten. I still found their general arrogance obnoxious,

though—especially RedJive, who had an infuriating habit of sending the same text

message every time he shot someone else down in the game’s player-versus-player

practice mode: You’re welcome.

Those two words would flash on your screen, accompanied by a blood-boiling

BEEP! RedJive obviously had a macro set up to fire that message like a missile, right

after he blasted your ship to bits—literally adding insult to injury. I knew why he (or

she) did it, too. It was a tactical move designed to anger his opponents and throw them

even further off balance right before they respawned in another ship. And it worked,

too. On everyone. Including me. But one of these days, when I finally got RedJive

between my crosshairs, it would be my turn to send one of those infuriating texts: No,

no, no, RedJive. You’re welcome.

Of course, now I constantly got accused of hacking all the time, too. To quote my

wizened boss, Ray Wierzbowski: “That’s how you know you’ve mastered a

videogame—when a bunch of butt-hurt crybabies start to accuse you of cheating in an

effort to cope with the beatdown they’ve just suffered at your hands.”

When I pulled up my friends list, I saw that Cruz and Diehl were both already

logged in, their player rankings listed beside their call signs. Cruz (whose call sign was

“Kvothe”) was currently in 6791st place, and Diehl (aka “Dealio”) was ranked 7445th.

Their Terra Firma player rankings were much higher, but they were both still a long

way from making it into the Thirty Dozen like Ray.

I switched on my helmet microphone and joined Kvothe and Dealio on their

private voice-chat line.

“You still won’t admit you’re wrong?” Cruz was shouting as I logged in.

“I told you, your Wonder Woman argument proves nothing!” Diehl said. “Yes,

Princess Diana of Themyscira did once wield Mjolnir in some obscure bullshit

crossover issue! That only proves my point, Cruz! Do you think Wonder Woman

would ever be caught dead wielding Sting?”

“No, but she’s a superhero, and they don’t use swords, do they?” Cruz said—clearly

without thinking his statement through.

“Superheroes don’t use swords?” Diehl said gleefully. “What about Nightcrawler?

Deadpool? Electra, Shatterstar, Green Arrow, Hawkeye—oh, and then there’s Blade

and Katana! Two superheroes who are actually named after swords! Oh, and Wolverine

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had that idiotic Muramasa Blade made with part of his soul. Which, while incredibly

lame, was still a far cooler magical weapon than Sting!”

“Sorry to interrupt, ladies,” I said. “I think you should just agree to disagree.”

“Iron Seagull!” Cruz called out. “I didn’t see you log in!”

“You’re late, fool,” Diehl said. “And Cruz won’t shut up about Wonder Woman!”

“I’m right on time,” I said. “The briefing doesn’t start for another thirty seconds.”

“What the hell happened with you and Herr Knotcher today?” Diehl asked. He said

it with a thick German accent.

“Nothing happened,” I said. “Because I split before anything did.”

“Well, he was making threats toward you to his idiot friends after the bell rang,” he

said. “Vengeance in his eyes and all that. Plan accordingly.”

I cleared my throat. “Time is short. Let’s talk mission, guys.”

“If this is another Disrupter takedown, I’m out, y’all,” Cruz said. “I’ll bail and play

Terra Firma instead. I’m serious, guys.”

“What’s the matter, Kvothe?” I asked. “Don’t you enjoy a challenge?”

“I enjoy balanced gameplay,” Cruz replied. “I’m not a masochist like you.”

I felt a brief impulse to defend the game, but it was hard to argue the point. The

Disrupter was a powerful new weapon the Sobrukai had unveiled after one of the

game’s most recent content updates. It was capable of disrupting the quantum

communication link to all of Earth’s defensive drones, rendering them useless. For the

past few months, all of the game’s most devoted players—myself included—had been

trying to figure out how to disable a Disrupter’s defenses and destroy the damn thing.

But so far the Sobrukai’s new super weapon had proven to be indestructible, and that

made many of the game’s higher-level missions more or less unwinnable.

Despite the endless barrage of complaints claiming that Chaos Terrain had broken

and/or ruined their own game, the company refused to remove the Disrupter from the

enemy’s arsenal or make it easier to destroy. As a result, a lot of Armada players were

defecting to play Terra Firma. The Disrupter never showed up in any TF mission—

maybe because by the time one made landfall, there was nothing the EDA’s ground

troops could do to stop it.

“It’s a new mission,” I said. “Be optimistic. There might not be a Disrupter in it.”

“Yeah,” Diehl said. “Maybe the devs have cooked up something even worse.”

“What could possibly be worse?” Cruz asked. “A mission where you have to blow

up a Death Star while being attacked by two Borg Cubes inside an asteroid field?”

“Cruz,” Diehl immediately chimed in. “I highly doubt that either the Borg or—”

Thankfully, an alert sounded in our headphones just then, signaling the start of the

mission briefing. All of the data display windows vanished and I found myself seated in

a packed briefing room, with Cruz’s and Diehl’s uniformed avatars Kvothe and Dealio

sitting on either side of me. We had each customized our avatars so that they vaguely

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resembled our real selves—only slightly taller, more muscular, and less pale. The

avatars of a few other last-minute arrivals were materializing in the tiered seats around

us.

In the fictional near-future reality of Armada, Cruz, Diehl, and I were drone pilots

stationed at Moon Base Alpha, a top-secret military outpost on the moon’s far side.

They were both lowly corporals, while I held the coveted rank of lieutenant.

The lights in the virtual briefing room dimmed, and the spinning crest of the Earth

Defense Alliance appeared on the view screen in front of us. As the crest faded away, it

was replaced by the familiar face of Admiral Archibald Vance, the Earth Defense

Alliance’s highest-ranking officer. The actor Chaos Terrain had hired to portray the

admiral totally nailed the part. His jagged facial scar and eye patch might have seemed

over the top on another actor, but this guy somehow managed to sell the whole look

and make you believe he really was a battle-hardened military commander facing

impossible odds with weary determination and grim resolve.

“Greetings, pilots,” the admiral said, addressing us from the view screen. “This

evening’s mission will not be an easy one—but it’s one I know many of you have been

hoping and waiting for since this war first began. Humanity has suffered countless

unprovoked attacks from these alien invaders over the years, but now we’re finally

going to take this fight to them.”

The corners of the admiral’s mouth turned upward in the faintest hint of a smile—

the closest I’d ever seen him come to displaying an emotion.

“Tonight, we’re finally going to hit them where they live—literally.”

The view screen window displaying the admiral’s face shrank and moved to the top

right-hand corner, while the rest of the screen displayed a technical diagram of a ship

model I’d never seen before. Its design reminded me a little of the Sulaco from Aliens.

Its elongated, armored hull made it look like a heavy-caliber machine gun drifting

through the void of space.

“This is the EDA’s first Interstellar Drone Carrier, the SS Doolittle. After traveling

for over two years at nearly seven times the speed of light, the Doolittle has finally

reached its target—and your target for this mission—the enemy’s home planet of

Sobrukai.”

“Finally!” Cruz shouted over the comm, perfectly echoing my own reaction.

All of the previous Armada missions had been focused on defense, and the game’s

action had always been confined to our own solar system, oftentimes on Earth itself, in

the skies over a major city or military outpost the Sobrukai were attacking, although

we’d also locked horns with them out beyond the orbit of Mars, near the edge of the

asteroid belt, and on the far side of the moon. This was the first mission that had ever

involved an offensive against our enemy—and we’d hit the mother lode.

“As soon as the Doolittle reaches Sobrukai’s orbit,” the admiral went on, “it will

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deactivate its cloaking device before launching the Icebreaker, our weapon of last

resort, along with an escort of fighters that will be under your control.”

The admiral began to play the tactical pre-vis on the screen. The computer

animation showed the cloaked Doolittle swinging into orbit above Sobrukai, and the

armada of glittering warships that encircled its equator, like an artificial planetary ring.

Spaced out evenly along this ring were six massive chrome orbs—Sobrukai

Dreadnaught Spheres. The players had nicknamed them “muthaships.” This was the

first time we’d ever had to go up against more than one of them.

The bay doors embedded on the starboard side of the Doolittle’s bow irised open and

the Icebreaker launched out of it, accompanied by a dense escort of three dozen

fighters. The Icebreaker looked like what it was—a giant focused beam-laser bolted to

an orbital nuclear weapons platform. The moment it began to fire its powerful melt

laser down at the thick layer of ice covering the planet’s surface, Sobrukai fighters

began to pour out of the six Dreadnaught spheres, streaming forth from glowing, slit- like hangar doors that had opened in their armored skins, to engage with the

comparatively tiny group of EDA fighters protecting the doomsday weapon being fired

directly down at the icy roof of their squid crib.

“Eat it!” Diehl cried in mock triumph. “How does it feel, assholes? You like that?”

I smiled under my helmet. Diehl was right. After months of getting our asses handed

to us on our home court, this chance to strike back at the Sobrukai on theirs was going

to be hugely cathartic.

“Your mission is to keep the Icebreaker operational for approximately three minutes

—just long enough for it to melt through the ice and launch its warheads into the

planet’s subsurface ocean, destroying the enemy’s underwater lair, an aquatic hive

located on the ocean floor.”

The tactical animation showed our drone fighters handily defending the Icebreaker

from the enraged enemy armada just long enough for it to finish melting its giant hole

and launch its warheads through it, into the planet’s subsurface ocean. At this point,

the ICBMs transformed into guided nuclear torpedoes, which quickly homed in on

the Sobrukai’s underwater cave city, which looked like a high-tech hive built into the

ocean’s rocky floor.

“Now I feel bad,” Diehl said. “Like we’re about to nuke Aquaman. Or the Little

Mermaid....”

“Pretend they’re Gungans,” Cruz suggested. “And that we get to nuke Jar Jar.”

They both laughed, but I was still focused on the tactical animation. It showed the

EDA’s torpedo nukes closing in on the Sobrukai’s aquatic hive like a volley of squid- seeking missiles. A few of them were knocked out by the hive’s defense turrets, but the

vast majority reached their target.

The ensuing detonations lit up the view screen like an old-school game of Missile

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Command. Sobrukai Central was obliterated, and the force of the subsequent

thermonuclear explosions rocked the planet so violently that cracks spread across the

entire circumference of its icy surface, making it resemble a shattered hardboiled egg.

There were no mushroom clouds—only a massive column of red steam rising from the

massive hole burned in the surface, which shot straight up into orbit as if the planet

were spraying blood from a gunshot wound.

“It’s another suicide mission,” Cruz said. “But it still looks fun. I’m in.”

It looked as if our inept alien enemy had made another colossal tactical mistake.

They had not only let their faster-than-light propulsion technology fall into our

reverse-engineering monkey hands, they had then given us enough time to build an

interstellar warship of our own and send it all the way across the vast gulf of space to

launch a counterattack against them.

As usual, the alien invaders’ tactics didn’t make a whole lot of sense—and as usual, I

didn’t care. I just wanted to kill me some aliens, and this was the juiciest setup for a

balls-out kamikaze mission in the history of the game—maybe any game.

In my headset, the admiral’s voice was drowned out by the sound of Diehl

pretending to snore. “Come on, old man!” he shouted. “Less talk, more rock!”

“Yeah, I wish we could skip this storyline crap,” Cruz said. “Bor-ing.”

“See, this is exactly why you two always get killed within the first two minutes,” I

said. “You never pay attention during the admiral’s briefing.”

“No, we always get killed because of you, Leeroy Jenkins!”

“I’ve asked you repeatedly to stop calling me that.”

“If the shoe fits, Smack Attack!” Cruz said. “Why don’t you try being a team player

for once? Just once?”

“Interplanetary warfare isn’t a team sport,” I replied. “Never has been.”

“Actually, it kinda is, if you think about it,” Diehl chimed in. “The home team

versus the visitors. Get it? Visitors?” After a pause, he added. “Because they’re aliens.”

“Yeah, we got it,” I said. “Will everybody shut up so I can hear the rest of this?”

“This mission must succeed,” the admiral was telling us now. “That armada is

preparing to depart for Earth, so this is our one and only chance to destroy the

Sobrukai before they come here to destroy us. The fate of humanity depends on the

Icebreaker reaching its target.” He paused to clasp his hands behind his back. “We’re

only going to get one shot at this, people, so let’s make it count.”

“Are you kidding?” Cruz shouted, as if the prerecorded actor could hear him. “This

better not be a single-play mission. It’s way too awesome!”

“He was just saying that for dramatic effect,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll be able to replay

it—just like with the Disrupter scenarios.”

“You better be right,” Diehl said. “Because there’s no way in hell we’re going to

pull this mission off on our first try—or our second or third, either. They’ve got six

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Dreadnaught Spheres! Each one loaded with over a billion killer alien drones—and a

Disrupter to boot!”

“They won’t activate one of their Disrupters here,” Cruz pointed out. “It wouldn’t

have any effect. For a quantum link to be disrupted, both the transmitting and

receiving ends have to be inside the sphere.” That was the reason the EDA had drones

and humans stationed on the far side of the moon.

“With no Disrupter to worry about, this should be doable,” I said. “All we have to

do is protect that Icebreaker for three minutes. No problemo.”

“No problem?” Cruz repeated. “Really? You think so?”

“Yeah. We just—you know—create a blockade.”

“With what?” Cruz said. “Did you check the mission stats? Our carrier only

brought two hundred drones along! The admiral failed to mention that.”

“Maybe he did it when you two were snoring?” I suggested.

“Like I said before, this is yet another example of unbalanced, poorly thought out

gameplay,” he continued. “The devs at Chaos Terrain are trying to piss us off now.

We’re gonna get slaughtered—again!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Diehl said. “How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?”

I laughed. Before Cruz could reply, we realized that Admiral Vance was bringing his

chalk talk to a close.

“Good luck, pilots. Everyone down here on Earth is counting on you.”

He snapped us a farewell salute, and his image winked out on the view screen, once

again replaced by the Earth Defense Alliance crest.

Then, while the mission loaded, we were all treated to a familiar cut scene showing

our squadron of heroic-looking, slightly out-of-focus EDA pilots sprinting out the

briefing room’s exit, down a brightly lit access corridor, and on into the Moon Base

Alpha Drone Operations Control Center, a large circular room with dozens of oval

hatchways embedded in the floor, spaced only a few meters apart—each containing a

drone controller pod. Their hatches hissed open, revealing simulated Interceptor

cockpits—each one a pilot seat surrounded by an array of controls and readouts, along

with a wraparound view screen shaped like a cockpit canopy window.

The cut scene ended, and my perspective shifted back to my avatar’s POV—only

now I was sitting inside my own drone controller pod.

A second later, the hatch hissed closed above me just as all of the control panels

around me lit up, as did the wraparound view screen. This created a second layer of

simulation—the illusion that I was now sitting inside an ADI-88 Aerospace Drone

Interceptor, powered up and waiting in its coiled launch rack in the Doolittle’s drone

hangar.

I reached out to blindly place my hands on the new controllers in front of me,

adjusting their placement to match the layout of my virtual cockpit inside the game.

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Then I took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, trying to relax. This was usually the

best part of my day, when I got to escape my suburban existence for a few hours and

become a crack fighter pilot duking it out with evil alien invaders.

But tonight, I didn’t feel like I was escaping anything. I felt anxious. Excited.

Righteous. Maybe even a little bloodthirsty.

Like I was going to war.

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thrusters. Then your drone would crash and burn—or, if you were lucky enough to be

fighting in space, it would just begin to drift helplessly through the void while you

waited for the power cells to recharge enough for your thrusters to come back online,

praying that an enemy ship didn’t pick you off first—which it almost always did.

The enemy Glaive Fighters had blaster turrets mounted on each of their wingtips

that could rotate in any direction, giving them an almost unlimited field of fire. But

my Interceptor’s plasma cannons (aka “sun guns”) and Macross missiles were both

forward-firing weapons, so my target needed to be in front of me if I was going to be

able to hit it. My ship had a laser turret, however, that was able to fire in any direction,

but unlike my sun guns, the turret used up a lot of power and had to be used sparingly.

Our ships were also each equipped with a self-destruct mechanism, which also

served as a weapon of last resort. As long as your drone had even a tiny bit of power

remaining, you could detonate its reactor core in an explosion that could vaporize

everything within a tenth of a kilometer. If you timed it right, you could take out

nearly a dozen enemy ships at once with this tactic. Unfortunately, the enemy also had

the ability to detonate their power cores—and they didn’t care about taking out

friendlies when they did it. A lot of players didn’t either, of course. For some, it was

their only real strategy. The only major downside to pulling this self-destruct move

was that it meant you would miss at least part of the battle, because before you could

fly back out to rejoin the fight, you had to wait to take control of another drone back

inside the hangar, and then wait for it to reach the front of the launch queue—all of

which could take up to a minute or more, depending on how fast the enemy was

dropping our drones.

A klaxon began to sound as the hangar’s belt-fed launch rack whirred into action

and began to deploy the Interceptors slotted ahead of mine one after the other, firing

them out of the belly of the Doolittle like bullets from a machine gun.

“Huzzah!” I heard Dealio say. “Now I finally get to kill some aliens!”

“Not if you get waxed before you fire a single shot,” Cruz said. “Like last time.”

“I told you, my Internet connection went out!” Dealio shouted.

“Dude, we heard you cursing on the comm after you got killed,” I reminded him.

“That proves nothing,” he said cheerfully. Then he shouted, “Cry havoc!”

When neither of us followed suit, he cleared his throat loudly over the comm.

“Uh, why didn’t either of you cry havoc with me just now?” he asked. “You

bitches best be crying me some havoc! You want to jinx us?”

“Sorry, Dealio,” I said. Then, as loud as I could, I shouted, “Cry havoc!”

“I’ll leaving the crying to you guys,” Cruz said, before muttering his own personal

pre-throw-down mantra to himself. “Led’s-do-dis.”

I cracked my knuckles, then pressed play on the best “ass-kicking track” on my

father’s old Raid the Arcade mix. As the opening bass line of Queen’s “Another One

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Bites the Dust” began to thud over my helmet’s built-in headphones, I felt myself

begin to slip into the zone.

The song’s machine gun beat was a perfect match for the timing and rhythm of the

enemy’s ships, in nearly every kind of mission. (“We Will Rock You” worked really

well for me during shooting gallery scenarios like this one, too.) When Freddie

Mercury’s vocals kicked in a few seconds later, I cranked up the volume in my headset

—apparently loud enough for my microphone to pick it up.

“Oh, great,” Cruz said. “Sounds like DJ Geriatric is spinning again tonight. What a

surprise.”

“If it’s too loud, you’re too old, Kvothe,” I shot back. “Why don’t you mute me

and put on the latest Kidz Bop compilation instead?”

“Perhaps I will,” he replied. “They’re unappreciated musical geniuses, you know.”

The two drones Cruz and Diehl were controlling launched out of the hangar just

ahead of me, each labeled with their call sign on my HUD.

“Attention, your drone is next in the launch queue!” my computer announced,

with far too much enthusiasm. “Prepare to engage the enemy!”

The belt cycled forward again, feeding my drone into the launch tunnel and then

blasting it out in space.

And then it was on like Red Dawn.

The first wave of responding enemy ships was already pouring out of the bottom of

the nearest Dreadnaught Sphere like hornets from a metal hive and streaking down on

us out of the blackness, approaching fast along our twelve o’clock.

A split second later, the space in front of my drone was filled with hundreds of

Sobrukai Glaive Fighters, along with dozens of dragon-like Wyverns uncoiling and

snaking through their swarming ranks, all of them moving in unison as they moved to

attack the Icebreaker. I held my breath as I targeted one of the lead Glaives. I felt like I

had a grudge to settle with the damn thing, for escaping from my fantasy life to invade

my reality—and for making me question my own sanity in the process.

My three-dimensional tactical display flashed, warning me of a reactor detonation

directly behind me, and I accelerated just in time to escape being caught in the blast.

Lasting longer than a few minutes in a battle of this size wasn’t easy. Evading enemy

fire required lightning-fast reflexes, wicked spatial awareness, and a gift for pattern

recognition. You had to learn how to find the best route to cut through the enemy’s

ranks, retreating and attacking simultaneously.

Once I’d spent enough hours studying how the Sobrukai ships moved and attacked

as a group, I gradually began to see the patterns hidden in all that chaos. Sometimes

they moved like a flock of birds, chasing its own tail as it circled for a landing. Other

times, they made sharp turns in the sky, like a school of predatory fish. But there was

always a pattern to it, and recognizing it allowed me to anticipate the enemy’s

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movements and reactions, and that made it relatively easy for me to get them in my

sights—as long as I was listening to the right music. Music was key. The old rock songs

on my father’s old mixtapes were perfect, because they had a steady, hard-driving beat

that served as my mental combat metronome.

I cut my engines and fired my retro-thrusters, swinging my ship around 180 degrees

without altering or slowing my forward momentum. Then I opened fire on the swarm

of Glaives converging on the Icebreaker’s tail with a series of bursts from my sun guns.

When I hit my first target, it imploded into collapsing fireballs of superheated plasma

in front of me, and a message flashed on my HUD informing me I’d made the first kill

of the engagement.

“One down, a few million to go,” I announced over the comm, already buzzing

with adrenaline. Killing videogame aliens had always been an outlet for my adolescent

frustrations—but tonight it felt as though I was venting compressed rage each time I

pulled the trigger.

It didn’t matter that the Sobrukai were fictional—I still wanted to kill every last one

of them.

“Guys, I’ve got two Glaives on my tail,” Diehl announced. “Any help?”

“Help yourself, pal!” I heard Cruz say. “We’re all getting our asses handed to us!”

“Not me,” I replied. “I am officially in the zone.”

I scanned my scopes, but neither Kvothe nor Dealio was currently visible, because

the Icebreaker was now directly between us. I fired my lateral thrusters and did a series

of diving barrel rolls to evade the incoming barrage of plasma bolts streaking past me

on all sides. I also teased the throttle to vary my ship’s speed and angle of ascent, while

I lined up my omnidirectional laser turret’s targeting reticle with a new threat—a train

of three Glaives I’d just picked up on my tail, looming on my HUD’s aft display.

The moment I got a targeting lock on the leader, I thumbed the laser turret’s

trigger. The beam only lasted for a split second and it wasn’t visible with the naked

eye, but its exact trajectory appeared on my HUD. I watched as it burned through the

hull of the Glaive closest to my tail, then continued burning on through the other two

Glaives directly behind that one, destroying them in a rapid chain of explosions: Boom!

Boom! Ba-Boom!

I powered down my already overheating laser, then switched back to my plasma

cannons, which automatically reoriented my HUD so that it showed what was in front

of my ship, instead of the dissipating fireball in its wake. Then I threw the throttle

wide open. But as I passed under the Icebreaker and prepared to swing up on its

opposite side, two more Glaives reappeared on my tail. They dropped in directly

behind me and I started to take heavy fire, knocking my shields down by half and

putting even more of a drain on my power cells, which were already dangerously low.

According to my HUD, the Icebreaker had been firing its melt laser for less than a

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minute, and the Sobrukai had already destroyed nearly half of our Interceptors.

Reinforcements were still pouring out of the Doolittle’s hangar, but these drones were

all piloted by players who had already gotten themselves killed once, and most of them

would be destroyed a second time within seconds of rejoining the battle.

Cruz was right—we weren’t going to be able to hold them off long enough.

“Screw this,” I said. “I’m gonna try and create a diversion.”

“Where are you going?” Cruz said over the comm. “Protect the Icebreaker, dumb

ass!”

“Sorry, Cruz!” I said, pushing my throttle forward. “But you’ll never guess who just

showed up. Leeeeeeroyyy—”

“Oh, Lightman, don’t you even dare!”

“—mmm-Jenkinsss!”

I broke formation with the others, leaving the Icebreaker behind as I moved to

attack the nearest Dreadnaught. I slammed my throttle forward and crossed in front of

it, strafing the turrets spaced along the sphere’s equator, taking out one or two of

them.

“Goddammit, Zack!” Cruz shouted. “Every time! Every goddamn time!”

I grinned and fired my thrusters, putting my fighter into an instantaneous vertical

dive, with the intention of slipping under the sphere to strafe its shield. This maneuver

cost me nearly a third of my remaining power, because my Interceptor had to

momentarily activate its inertia-cancellation field to execute it. But I shook several of

the Sobrukai fighters off my tail, because they needed to execute the same move to

stay on me, and most of them didn’t have enough power. Instead, they had to

fishhook around behind me, then try to get a bead on my Interceptor again—when I

was already gone.

Another swarm of Glaives emerged from the nearby Dreadnaught, all diving at the

Icebreaker in a straight line, firing in tandem. I shredded them with a single sustained

burst from my sun guns, bringing my Sobrukai kill count up to nine. Not bad, but also

not up to my usual standards. My aim was a bit off.

“Shit!” I heard Diehl shout over the comm. “I just lost my gorram shields because

I’m already out of frakkin’ power!”

“Dude,” Cruz said. “You shouldn’t mix swears from different universes.”

“Says who?” Diehl shot back. “Besides, what if BSG and Firefly took place in the

same universe? You ever consider that?”

I heard a thunderous series of explosions behind me and swung my head around just

in time to see the IDC Doolittle erupt into a huge fireball amid a hail of enemy plasma

fire.

“What did I tell you?” Cruz muttered into his headset. “There goes the carrier, and

the rest of our drone reserves.”

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“Yeah, and that goddamn Icebreaker still isn’t finished making its stupid ice-fishing

hole, either,” Diehl added. “Game over, man. Game-the-fuck-over.”

“Not yet,” I muttered.

Clenching my teeth, I swung my Interceptor back around and returned to try to

help defend the Icebreaker, targeting the cluster of Glaives attacking its aft thrusters—

but I couldn’t get a lock on any of the targets flashing on my HUD, because I kept

having to dodge incoming enemy fire, as well as friendly fire from the sentry guns on

the Icebreaker’s armored skin as my drone skimmed over it.

My drone took two more direct hits, knocking my shields down to fifteen percent.

One more hit and they would fail, and my weapons would follow soon after. Not

good.

I jammed my flight stick forward, cutting into a sharp dive to avoid flying right into

the beam of the Icebreaker’s pulsing melt laser. Ignoring TAC’s warnings about my

drone’s imminent power failure, I gunned the throttle and continued turning into a

barrel roll, both sun guns still blazing.

“Shit!” I heard Diehl curse. “They got me, guys. I’m out.”

I glanced at my HUD just in time to see Diehl’s Interceptor vanish off my scopes.

“Me too,” Cruz added a second later. He unleashed a colorful stream of profanity

on his comm and logged out of the game completely.

The digital deaths of my two best friends distracted me just long enough to take

another series of direct hits, causing my shields and weapons to fail. I immediately

initiated the self-destruct sequence on my drone’s power core, even though I knew it

was unlikely I would last the seven seconds required for it to complete.

All of the Glaive Fighters in the vicinity began to redirect their fire at me, hoping to

destroy my core before it could complete its countdown and go critical. But in doing

so, they were momentarily forced to take their focus off the Icebreaker, just as I’d

hoped.

Five seconds remaining on my drone’s self-destruct sequence. Then four, three—

But that was when the inevitable happened—the Icebreaker finally took one hit too

many and exploded directly beneath me. The ensuing fireball destroyed my drone,

along with every ship within its blast radius.

Ominous music began to play in my headphones as the words MISSION FAILED

appeared, superimposed over my now disembodied view of the Sobrukai armada, as

each of the six Dreadnaught spheres began to recall their remaining drones and return

to their original formation in orbit, with this minor threat to their world now

vanquished.

I BLINDLY POWERED off my game console and sat in the darkness for a moment

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before pulling off my VR helmet and returning to the real world with a sigh.

My phone rang a few seconds later. Cruz was on the line—he had already checked,

and wanted to let me know that Attack on Sobrukai wasn’t on the list of replayable

missions—at least not yet. Then he conferenced Diehl in for his traditional post- mission bitch fest. After, the Mikes tried to cajole me into joining them for a Terra

Firma mission, but I mumbled something about having homework and said I’d see

them at school tomorrow.

Then I got up and went over to my closet. When I opened the door, a small

avalanche of stuff spilled out onto my feet. I rummaged through the dense forest of

dress shirts and winter coats on plastic hangers until I found my father’s old jacket way

at the back. It was an old black baseball jacket with leather sleeves, and it was

completely covered, front and back, with embroidered patches, all somehow science

fiction or videogame related, including several high-score-award patches for old

Activision games like Starmaster, Dreadnaught Destroyer, Laser Blast, and Kaboom!

Running down both sleeves were logos and military insignia from the Rebel Alliance,

the Star League, the United Federation of Planets, the Colonial Fleet from BSG, and

the Robotech Defense Force, among others.

I studied each one in turn, running my fingertips over the embroidery. When I’d

last tried this jacket on a few years ago, it had still been too big on me. But when I

slipped it on now, it fit me perfectly, almost as if it had been tailor-made.

I found myself itching to wear it to school tomorrow—despite my earlier vow to

stop living in the past and obsessing over the father I had never known.

I looked around at the posters, toys, and models that filled my room and felt a pang

in my chest at the thought of moving all my dad’s prized possessions up into the attic.

Despite my good intentions, it seemed I wasn’t quite ready to let go of my father. Not

yet.

I leaned back in my chair, stifling a yawn that did not wish to be stifled. I did a

quick systems-wide status check, the results of which confirmed that my wagon was

draggin’. Plutonium chamber empty. Sleep required immediately.

I took three steps toward my bed and collapsed facefirst onto my vintage Star Wars

bed sheets, where I immediately fell into a fitful sleep.

My dreams that night were plagued by visions of a giant Sobrukai overlord

constricting its enormous tentacles around a defenseless planet Earth as if preparing to

swallow it whole.

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WHEN I WALKED out to my car the next morning and glanced down to unlock it, I

saw the long sine-wave gouge that now ran bumper to bumper down the driver’s side.

Someone had keyed my car. I turned to scan the surrounding houses, on the off

chance Knotcher was still in the vicinity. But he was nowhere to be seen, and it

occurred to me he had probably done this last night, while the Omni was parked

outside Starbase Ace. I just hadn’t noticed after work because it was dark out, and my

car’s paint job wasn’t exactly unblemished to begin with.

I turned back to resurvey the damage, this time in the context of the vehicle’s

overall condition. The long scratch Knotcher had added would be barely noticeable to

anyone else. One of the few perks of driving an ancient, rusted-out shit wagon was

that it took real effort to make it look any less aesthetically pleasing than it already was.

This realization allowed me to calm myself enough to heed the whispered advice of

Master Yoda now on repeat in my head: Let go of your anger.

I often tried to calm myself with Yoda’s voice (which sounded nothing like Fozzie

Bear, damn you) during moments of distress. Obi-Wan or Qui-Gon or Mace Windu

sometimes had calming movie-quote wisdom to share too.

That was only on good days, of course. On the bad ones, I found myself drawing on

equally compelling advice from Lords Vader or Palpatine.

But it wasn’t their dark influence that motivated me to get the tire iron out of the

Omni’s trunk and place it inside my backpack. It was the voice of my friend Diehl,

recounting his warning last night about Knotcher’s threat to seek revenge.

I PARKED MY car in the student lot and trudged toward my school’s front entrance

while counting off the number of days remaining in my sentence—only forty-five

more to go.

But when I reached the open grassy area bordering the parking lot, Knotcher was

there waiting for me, along with two of his brain-trust buddies. All three were

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grinning, arms folded across their chests like goons in some Power Rangers episode.

My gaze shot over to the school’s front entrance, calculating the distance. If I tried, I

could probably make it there before they stopped me. But I found that I didn’t want

to.

Knotcher was standing out in front. As I’d feared, keying my car wasn’t enough.

He’d decided that his manhood was now in question, and that he had no choice but to

corner me and deliver a beating—with some help, of course.

Knotcher’s two gargantuan pals were known around school as “the Lennys,” even

though neither of them was actually named Lenny. They’d been saddled with this

nickname after our class read Of Mice and Men in sophomore English. I didn’t think the

moniker really fit. Yes, they were both big and dumb, like the character in the book,

but deep down, Steinbeck’s Lenny had been a kindhearted soul. The two Lennys

standing in front of me now (who I thought of as Skinhead Lenny and Neck-Tattoo

Lenny, respectively) were both as mean as they were massive. But their size was

dwarfed by the epic scope of their stupidity.

“Love your new jacket!” Knotcher said. He made a show of slowly circling me to

examine each of the patches sewn onto it. “These are really impressive. Is there a little

rainbow patch on there somewhere, too?”

After a few seconds of processing time, both of the Lennys chuckled—that was how

long it took their reptilian brains to complete Knotcher’s elegant rainbow-equals-gay

equation.

When I failed to respond, Knotcher tried again.

“You know, that sorta looks like a varsity letterman’s jacket,” he said. “If being a

videogame nerd who can’t get laid was a sport.” He laughed. “Then I suppose you’d

be our star quarterback—eh, Lightman?”

I could already feel my anger spiraling out of control. What had made me think it

was a good idea to wear my father’s old jacket to school? I’d basically been inviting

public ridicule on the one topic guaranteed to set me off—and of course Knotcher

would be the one to take the bait. Maybe that was why I’d done it in the first place—

the same reason I’d confronted Knotcher yesterday. Some angry caveman lobe of my

brain was itching for a fight—and so I had orchestrated this confrontation. This was

my doing.

Knotcher and the Lennys took a step toward me. But I stood my ground.

“At least you were smart enough to bring backup this time,” I said as I slipped off

my backpack and took both of its shoulder straps in my right hand, feeling the

comforting weight of the tire iron inside.

Knotcher’s smile momentarily faltered, then twisted into a sneer.

“They’re just here to make sure you don’t fight dirty,” he said. “Like last time.”

Then, in direct contradiction to what he’d just said, Knotcher nodded at the Lennys,

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and all three of them began to spread out, forming a rough semicircle around me.

In my head, I thought I could hear the cracked-but-commanding voice of Emperor

Palpatine, saying, “Use your aggressive feelings, boy. Let the hate flow through you!”

“You’re in deep shit now, eh, Lightman?” Knotcher sneered. “Kinda like your old

man.”

I knew Knotcher was trying to push my buttons. Unfortunately, he’d pushed the

big red one first. The ICBMs had just left their silos, and now there was no recalling

them.

I didn’t remember unzipping my backpack, or taking out the tire iron, but I must

have, because now I had the cold steel rod clenched in my hand, and I was raising it to

strike.

All three of my opponents stood frozen for a moment, their eyes wide. The Lennys

threw up their hands and started backing away. Knotcher’s eyes flicked over to them,

and I saw him registering that his simian pals had bowed out of the fight. He started

moving backward too.

I looked at the curb a few feet behind him, had a nasty thought, and followed

through on it by lunging at Knotcher with the tire iron. He lurched backward and—

just as I’d hoped—caught a heel on the concrete rise and landed flat on his back.

And then I was standing over him, looking down at the tire iron clutched in my

hands.

Off to my left, someone screamed. My head snapped around and I saw that an

audience had gathered—a handful of students on their way in to first period. Among

them one girl, too young and deer-in-the-headlights to be anything but a freshman,

slapped a hand over her mouth and flinched backward as I looked her way. As if she

was terrified that I—Zack the school psycho—would choose her as my next target.

I glanced back at the Lennys, who were now standing among the students who had

gathered to watch the fight. All of the onlookers seemed to be wearing the same

expression of horrified anticipation, as if they believed they might be seconds away

from witnessing their first homicide.

A wave of cold shame washed over me as the intensity of my rage faded away. I

looked down at the tire iron clutched in my hands and let it clatter to the pavement. I

heard a chorus of nervous laughter behind me, along with more than one relieved sigh.

I stepped away from Knotcher. He slowly got to his feet. We stared at each other

for a moment, and he looked as if he was about to say something when his gaze shot

upward, focused on something in the sky behind me.

When I turned around, I saw a strange-looking aircraft approaching from the east,

moving at an incredible speed. The closer it got, the more familiar it looked. My brain

still refused to accept what my eyes were seeing—until a few seconds later, when the

craft braked to a dead stop and hovered directly over us, close enough for me to make

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After he shook hands with all of them, the shortest of the three men removed his

sunglasses, and I heard myself gasp. It was Ray Wierzbowski, my boss at Starbase Ace.

What the hell was Ray doing here, dressed like one of the Men in Black? And

where the hell had he obtained a working Earth Defense Alliance tactical shuttle?

I watched in a daze as Ray flashed some form of ID at Principal Wood. They

conferred briefly and shook hands again; then Ray raised a small bullhorn and used it

to address the growing crowd.

“We apologize for interrupting your morning, everyone,” Ray said, in an

uncharacteristically commanding voice that echoed across the school grounds. “But we

desperately need to locate Zack Lightman. Does anyone know where he is right now?

Zack Lightman? Please look around and point him out if you see him. We require his

assistance with an urgent matter of national security. Zack! Zack Lightman!”

I realized Ray was saying my name about the same time I realized that everyone

within my field of vision was now staring and pointing at me—including Knotcher

and both Lennys. It was like that scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Eventually,

my public school training took over and I raised my hand and shouted “Here!”

When he spotted me, Ray grinned and started running across the grass toward me

like his life depended on it. It was the fastest I’d ever seen him move.

“Hey there, Zack!” he said when he reached me, only slightly out of breath. Then

he rested a hand on my shoulder and nodded at the gleaming shuttle behind him.

“Wanna go for a ride?”

It’s finally happening, Zack. The Call to Adventure you’ve been waiting for your whole life.

It’s standing right in front of you.

And I was scared shitless.

But I still managed to nod my head and mumble, “Yes.”

Ray grinned—proudly, I think—and squeezed my shoulder.

“I thought so!” he said. “Follow me, pal. There’s no time to lose.”

As the entire school looked on, I followed Ray back across the lawn and over to the

waiting Earth Defense Alliance shuttle. As the crowd parted to clear a path for us, I

spotted my ex-girlfriend, Ellen, staring at me in disbelief from amid the sea of faces.

The crowd swelled forward and I lost sight of her. I spotted Cruz and Diehl a few

seconds later. They’d managed to push their way to the front of the crowd and were

standing a few feet away from the two Secret Service types, who were now standing

guard in front of the shuttle, holding the throng at bay with the force-field-like power

of their buzz cuts and Ray-Bans.

“Zack!” Cruz shouted when we made eye contact. “What’s happening? This is

crazy!”

Diehl shoved him aside and tried to lunge in my direction, his arms flailing like a

drowning man. “You lucky bastard!” he cried. “Tell them to take us, too!”

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Then I found myself inside the shuttle, in the jump seat directly across from Ray

and his two suited companions. The hatch slid closed, silencing the roar of the crowd.

Following Ray’s example, I buckled my safety harness across my chest and pulled it

tight.

As soon as he saw that I was safely strapped in, Ray gave a thumbs-up to the lone

pilot sitting up in the cockpit, who was wearing an honest-to-God Earth Defense

Alliance uniform. For a few absurd seconds, I caught myself appreciating the attention

to detail this dude had obviously put into his cosplay. Then he completed the shuttle’s

ignition sequence and fired its engines.

As we ascended, my internal monologue went something like this: That isn’t some

guy cosplaying at SobruCon IV, Zack. To me, he looks like a real-life EDA pilot, in a real-life

EDA uniform, who is currently piloting the real-life EDA shuttle you appear to be aboard. So,

let me see now—multiply by two and carry the one—hey, that’s really weird, but if my math is

correct then THE EARTH DEFENSE ALLIANCE IS FUCKING REAL!

I pressed my face to the curved window beside my seat and gazed down at my peers

and teachers, still gathered in front of the school far below, already shrinking to the size

of ants as we zoomed upward in a surreal blur of speed.

But when I closed my eyes, it didn’t even feel like we were moving. No g-forces

were pushing me back into my seat. The shuttle wasn’t even shimmying or vibrating

from turbulence as it climbed through the atmosphere.

Then I remembered—according to Armada’s backstory, all Earth Defense Alliance

ships were outfitted with reverse-engineered alien technology, including a

Trägheitslosigkeit Field Generator, which created a small inertia-cancellation field

around a spacecraft, by “harnessing the aligned spin of gyromagnetic particles to alter

the curvature of space-time” or something. I’d always assumed this was just more

phlebotinum-powered pseudoscientific handwavium, concocted by Chaos Terrain’s

writers to make their game’s impossibly kick-ass outer space dogfights seem mildly

plausible, just as Star Trek and Star Wars used “inertial dampers” and “inertial

compensators” so that Han Solo and Captain Kirk didn’t get squished into heroic jelly

every time they made the jump to light/warp speed.

I clamped my eyes shut again. It still felt like I was sitting in a car idling at a red

light. So much for Sir Isaac Newton.

A DENSE LAYER of clouds obscured the stunning view, and I finally managed to tear

my eyes away from the window. I turned to face Ray. He was still smiling. His two

stoic companions remained stonily silent and expressionless.

“Nice jacket,” Ray said. But unlike when Knotcher had commented about it, there

was no sarcasm in his voice. He leaned forward to admire the patches running down

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both of my sleeves. “I used to have a few of those Activision patches, you know. Not

easy to get.”

I stared back at him in disbelief. He was making small talk with me, as if we were

still behind the counter at Starbase Ace. As if he hadn’t just turned my whole notion of

reality upside down and inside out.

I felt a wave of anger. Mild-mannered, middle-aged Raymond Wierzbowski—my

employer, close friend, and surrogate father figure—had clearly lied to me about a

great many things. The deceitful bastard obviously knew what was going on—and had

for quite some time now.

“What the fuck is happening right now, Ray?” I asked, unnerved by the amount of

fear in my own voice.

“ ‘Somebody set up us the bomb,’ pal,” he quoted. “Now it’s time to take off every

zig for great justice.”

He chuckled softly. I wanted to sock him in the face. Instead, I started shouting.

“Where did you get an Earth Defense Alliance tactical shuttle? How can this thing

even be real? And where is it taking us?”

Before he could answer, I pointed at the two men seated beside him. “Who are

those two clowns? For that matter, who the hell are you, asshole! Huh?”

“Okay, okay!” Ray said, throwing up his hands. “I’ll try to answer your questions—

but first you need to take a deep breath and calm down a little bit, all right?”

“Fuck calming down!” I shouted, straining against my safety harness. “And fuck

you, too, Ray, you lying sack of shit! Tell me what’s going on, or I’ll lose it, I swear!”

“Okay,” he said in a soothing voice. “But first, I need you to breathe, Zack.”

He studied my face anxiously. I realized then that I did not, in fact, appear to be

breathing. So I took a deep, gasping breath, then exhaled slowly. I felt a little better

then, and my breathing began to normalize. Ray nodded, satisfied.

“Good,” he said. “Thank you. Now go ahead and ask your questions again, one at a

time, and I’ll do my best to answer them, if I can.”

“Where the hell did this shuttle come from? Who built it?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” he said. “The Earth Defense Alliance built it.” He nodded at

his two companions. “And to answer your earlier question, these two men are EDA

field agents, here to ensure your safe transport.”

“No way,” I said. “There’s no way the EDA can be real.”

“It’s real,” he said. “The Earth Defense Alliance is a top-secret global military

coalition formed over four decades ago.”

“Formed to do what? To ‘defend Earth,’ I suppose?”

He nodded. “Hence the name.”

“To defend it from what?” I wanted to hear him say it. Out loud.

“From an alien invasion.”

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I studied Ray’s face for any hint of irony, but his expression was now gravely

serious. I glanced at his two companions to gauge their reaction, but they didn’t even

seem to be listening to our conversation. Both of them had taken out smartphones and

were studying their displays.

I looked back at Ray. “An alien invasion? By who? The Sobrukai? Evil humanoid

squids from Tau Ceti? You’re gonna tell me they’re real, too?”

“No, not exactly,” he said. “The Sobrukai are fictional, invented by Chaos Terrain

to serve as the alien antagonists in their videogames. But, as you’re probably now

realizing, Armada and Terra Firma aren’t just games. They are simulators designed for a

very specific purpose—to train citizens all over this planet to operate the drones that

will defend it.”

“Defend it from who? You just said the Sobrukai aren’t real....”

“They aren’t,” he said. “But they’re stand-ins for a real alien threat, whose existence

had to be kept secret until now to prevent global panic.” He gave me an odd smile.

“The name Sobrukai is actually a play on the word sobriquet, which is just a fancy term

for nickname. Sneaky, eh?”

A terrible thought occurred to me. “Yesterday morning, I was sure I saw a Glaive

Fighter....”

“That was the real deal,” he said. “You spotted a real enemy scout ship. EDA intel

says a bunch of them have been spotted over the past twenty-four hours, all over the

world. We think they’re conducting surveillance on all of our hard-line intranet nodes

—”

“But it looked exactly like a Sobrukai Glaive!”

“Of course it did,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Chaos Terrain

modeled all of the Sobrukai’s forces after our real enemy. They re-created their ships

and drones as accurately as possible inside the sim—in the games. To make them as

realistic as possible.”

“So these aliens, they really have Glaive Fighters? And Wyverns—”

“And Dreadnaught Spheres, Spider Fighters, Basilisks—they all really exist,” he said.

“Chaos Terrain made up those names, but everything else about the enemy’s drones in

Armada is completely accurate. Their appearance, weaponry, maneuverability, tactics,

and strategy—all were based on direct observations of our real enemy’s forces and

technology, made during our previous engagements with them.”

“Previous engagements?” I asked. “How long have we been fighting them? Where

are they from? What do they look like? When did they make first contact? If—”

He held up a hand to cut me off, sensing the hysteria creeping back into my voice.

“I can’t tell you any of that yet,” he said. “The information we’ve gathered on the

enemy is still classified.” He checked his watch. “But not for very much longer. You’ll

be fully briefed as soon as we reach Nebraska.”

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He gave me a sad smile. “Sorry about that, Zack,” he said. “It wasn’t up to me.”

That suddenly drove it home. I had known this man for over six years, and that

entire time he had been lying to me—probably about everything, including his

identity.

“Who are you? Is Ray Wierzbowski even your real name?”

“Actually, no,” he said. “My real name is Raymond Habashaw. I borrowed

‘Wierzbowski’ from one of the Colonial Marines in Aliens.”

“I mentioned that once, and you told me it was a fucking coincidence!”

He shrugged and looked sheepish. It made me want to strangle him.

“I was given a new identity when the EDA stationed me in Beaverton in the first

place—to keep an eye on you.”

“To keep an eye on me? Why?”

“Why do you think?” he said. “You possess a very rare and valuable talent, Zack.

The EDA has been tracking and profiling you ever since you first played a videogame

online. That’s why I was assigned to watch over you, and to help facilitate your

training.” He grinned. “You know, sort of like Obi-Wan, watching over Luke while

he was growing up on Tatooine.”

“You’re a bold-faced liar like Obi-Wan, too!” I shot back. “That’s for sure.”

Ray’s smile vanished, and his eyes narrowed.

“And you’re being a whiny little bitch, just like Luke!”

The other two EDA agents snickered—they were apparently listening after all. I

shot them a glare, and they conspicuously returned their attention to their

smartphones. I glanced down at the devices they were holding, wondering how they

were even getting a signal up here. Each phone was slighter larger and thicker than a

normal mobile phone, and hinged so that it opened like a portable gaming console.

One of the agents appeared to be playing a game of some kind on his, but I couldn’t

see his display well enough to tell what it was. I looked back up at Ray.

“Listen, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that. I just thought you’d be a little

more appreciative, that’s all. Do you think I enjoyed living in Beaverton all this time?”

Now I was beginning to understand. Ray had spent the past six years of his life stuck

with what soldiers referred to as a “shit detail.” Trapped behind the counter of a used

videogame shop in a desolate suburban strip mall, with nothing to do but watch me

play Armada, listen to all of my pointless adolescent bitching, or pass the time by

ranting to me about alien abductions and government cover-ups—

All of his X-Files-inspired alien conspiracy rants over the years had probably been his

own way of trying to psychologically prepare me for the truth, whenever the EDA

finally decided that I deserved to hear it—which was right now, evidently. At the last

possible fucking moment.

Of course, the truth—or at least some of it—had already been revealed to me years

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ago, back when I’d first read my father’s journal. I’d just been incapable of believing it.

That led me to finally ask the question I’d been working up the courage to ask ever

since I’d first boarded the shuttle.

“Was my father ever recruited by the Earth Defense Alliance?”

He let out a sigh, as if he’d been waiting for this question—and dreading it.

“I honestly don’t know,” he said. Before I could call him a liar again, he went on.

“I’m telling you the truth, so just hold on now and listen to me!” He took a deep

breath. “This isn’t about your father, Zack. Try to understand what’s happening—

what’s at stake. The entire future of the human race—”

“Just answer me! I read his journal—he knew about the EDA. He was starting to

figure out what they were, and what they were up to, right before he died in some

bizarre on-the-job accident. So what really happened? Did the EDA have him killed to

keep him quiet?”

Ray was silent for what seemed like an eternity. But it may have only been a

second.

“I told you, I don’t know what happened to your father,” he said. “I’m a lowly field

agent, with equally low security clearance.” He held up a finger to keep me from

interrupting him again. “Here’s what I do know: The EDA does have a file on him in

their database. But it’s classified, and I’ve never been able to access it. So I don’t know

what his connection was to the EDA, if there was one at all. But the EDA wasn’t

created to murder people. It was formed to save them.”

I was hyperventilating now.

“Please, Ray,” I heard myself say. “You know how important this is to me....”

“Yes, I do,” he said. “That’s why you need to pull yourself together right now and

focus; otherwise you’ll ruin any chance to find out what they know about your

father.”

“What do you mean? What chance?”

“You’re being transported to an enlistment briefing,” he said. “Afterward, you’ll be

offered the opportunity to enlist in the Earth Defense Alliance.”

“But—”

“If you take it, you’ll be made a flight officer,” he said, continuing to talk over me.

“And then you’ll outrank me.” He looked me directly in the eyes. “You’ll also have a

higher security clearance than I do. You might be able to access your father’s file.”

Ray seemed about to say something more when a boom shook the entire shuttle. I

felt a rush of panic, thinking we’d just come under attack. Then I realized we’d just

broken the sound barrier.

“Hold on to your seat,” Ray said, taking his own advice. “We’re about to go

suborbital.”

Dozens of questions were still ricocheting around in my head, but I managed to put

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them out of my mind, at least for the moment. Then I forced myself to sit back and try

to enjoy the rest of this surreal ride I now found myself on.

This was a smart move, because I was about to make my first trip into space.

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I CLUTCHED MY jump seat’s armrests, watching anxiously as the cobalt blue sky

outside the shuttle’s porthole windows darkened to a deep shade of indigo, then on to

pitch black just a few heartbeats later.

We were at the edge of space. The boundary I’d dreamed of crossing my entire life.

I’d never really believed I’d get the chance to do it during my lifetime—let alone

today, when I should’ve been in my first-period civics class.

I strained against my safety harness and craned my neck toward the curved window,

trying to take in the entire radiant blue curve of Earth now visible beyond it. The sight

was overwhelming, and made the little kid inside me involuntarily whisper, “Wow!”

Unfortunately, he must have whispered it out loud, because Ray was now staring at

me with the same amused smirk he gave me every time he schooled me in a Terra

Firma death match. I nearly flipped him the bird out of force of habit. Some thick part

of my brain still thought Ray was my boss and friend.

We were only in low-Earth orbit for a minute. I kept waiting for the gravity to cut

out, right up until the shuttle reached its apogee. No such luck. I still felt no indication

that we were even moving—not even when we began to fall back to Earth and the

blackness outside my window returned to a deep, dark blue and continued to grow

lighter in hue every second until daylight flooded in again.

We sliced down through another dense layer of clouds, and suddenly the ground

was rushing upward in a terrifying blur of speed. But then, in the space of a few

seconds, we decelerated to a dead stop. I felt momentarily nauseous, but only because

my eyes and my body were sending my brain conflicting information about whether

or not I was in motion.

When I recovered a second later, I looked back out the window. Directly below us

was a large white ranch house flanked by several barns and outbuildings and a long row

of tower grain silos topped with steel domes that glinted in the morning sun, like

rockets waiting to be launched. The farm was surrounded on all sides by a vast sea of

fields and rolling green hills and prairies, broken only by a single dirt road that snaked

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enormous subterranean hangar, with a large circular runway that was now spread out

below us. Our shuttle landed at its northern edge, joining a long line of identical EDA

tactical shuttles parked along the runway’s glowing perimeter.

As soon as the doors slid open, Ray unbuckled his harness, jumped out onto the

runway, and motioned for me to follow. My fingers fumbled with the latch of my

safety harness for a few seconds; then I finally slipped free of it. After I tested my legs

to make sure they were both still working, I climbed outside to join Ray. The pilot

and the other two EDA agents remained on board. Like an idiot, I awkwardly waved

goodbye to them just before the shuttle doors closed again with a pneumatic hiss.

I checked the time on my phone and saw that the trip here from Beaverton had

taken less than twenty minutes. I also noticed that I wasn’t getting a signal down here.

Which meant I wouldn’t be able to call my mom and tell her I was all right. Suddenly,

I wanted very badly to hear her voice. Had the school called her yet? What had they

told her? She had to be going crazy with worry right now.

Earlier that morning, when I’d stumbled downstairs, she’d surprised me with

dinner-for-breakfast waiting on the kitchen table. Her “monstrous meatloaf” and

mashed potatoes—my absolute favorite. She’d watched me stuff my face, grinning

from ear to ear and pausing every few minutes to tell me to slow down and chew my

food. I’d given her a quick kiss on the cheek and rushed out the door, worried that she

might decide to revisit the dreaded subject of my academic future at any moment.

She’d called out “I love you,” and I’d mumbled it back to her as I continued hurrying

out to my car. Had she heard me? I felt like kicking myself for not making sure.

“Welcome to Crystal Palace,” Ray said. “That’s the EDA’s code name for this

place.”

“Why?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Because it’s easier to say than ‘Earth Defense Alliance Strategic

Command Post Number Fourteen,’ ” he said. “Sounds cooler, too.”

As we stepped away from the shuttle, I took in my new surroundings. Hundreds of

people were hurrying around the runway in what appeared to be a state of highly

organized chaos. Most of them wore Earth Defense Alliance combat fatigues like our

shuttle pilot, and I found myself wondering if I was going to be issued a uniform, too.

I heard a rush of air over our heads and looked up to see a procession of four more

shuttles descending through the entry shaft. As each one set down on the runway and

discharged its passengers, other civilians like me emerged, escorted by one or more

EDA agents wearing dark suits. Most of them appeared to be holding it together pretty

well. A few of them looked terrified, like lambs being led to the slaughter, but the vast

majority appeared to be having the time of their lives. I took quick stock of my own

emotions, and I decided I fell somewhere in the middle.

There was a loud whoosh behind us as our shuttle lifted off again, and Ray and I