Armada (4 page)

Aside from his fictional
Polybius
and
Phaëton
drawings, he never gave much in the way of evidence. Just his own wild theories.

“The military—or some shadow organization within the military—is tracking and profiling all of the world's highest-scoring videogamers, using a variety of methods.” Then he detailed one example—Activision's high-score patches.

Back in the '80s, the game company Activision had run a popular promotion in which players who mailed in proof of a high score—in the form of a Polaroid of the high score on their TV screen—received cool embroidered patches as a reward. My father believed Activision's patch promotion had actually been an elaborate ruse designed to obtain the names and addresses of the world's highest-scoring gamers.

At the end of the entry, using a different-colored pen, my father had added: “Much easier to track elite gamers now via the Internet! Was this one of the reasons it was created?”

Of course, my father never actually got around to specifying exactly what he believed the military was going to recruit all of the world's most gifted gamers to
do
. But his timeline and journal entries were filled with ominous references to games, films, and shows about alien visitors, both friendly and hostile:
Space Invaders, E.T., The Thing, Explorers, Enemy Mine, Aliens, The Abyss, Alien Nation, They Live. …

I shook my head vigorously, as if it were possible to shake out the crazy.

Nearly two decades had elapsed since my father had first written all of this stuff in his journal, and in all that time, no secret government videogame conspiracy had ever come to light. And that was because the whole idea had been a product of my late father's overactive—perhaps even borderline delusional—imagination. The guy had grown up wanting to be Luke Skywalker or Ender Wiggin or Alex Rogan so badly that he'd concocted this elaborate, delusional fantasy in an attempt to make it so.

And that, I told myself, was probably the exact same sort of starry-eyed wanderlust that had triggered my Glaive Fighter hallucination. Maybe the whole incident had even been inspired by the contents of the very journal I now held in my hands. Maybe the memory of my father's conspiracy theory had been sitting up in a forgotten corner of my brain all these years, like a discarded crate of dynamite sticks sweating drops of nitroglycerine onto my subconscious.

I took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, comforted by my half-assed self-diagnosis. Nothing but a mild flare-up of inherited nuttiness, brought on by my lifelong dead-dad fixation and somewhat related self-instituted overexposure to science fiction.

And I
had
been spending way too much time playing videogames lately—especially
Armada
. I played it every night and all day on the weekends. I'd even ditched school a few times to play elite missions on servers in Asia that were scheduled in the middle of the day over here. Clearly I had been overdoing it for some time now. But that was easy enough to remedy. I would just go cold turkey for a while, to clear my head.

Sitting there in the dusty attic, I made a silent vow to quit playing
Armada
entirely for two full weeks—starting right after the elite mission scheduled later that night, of course. Bailing on that wasn't even really an option. Elite missions only rolled out a few times a year, and they usually revealed new plot developments in the game's ongoing storyline.

In fact, I had spent the past week practicing and preparing for tonight's mission, playing
Armada
even more than I normally did. I'd probably been seeing Glaive Fighters in my sleep. No wonder I was seeing them when I was awake now, too. I just needed to cut myself off. To take a break. Then everything would be fine. I would be fine.

I was still repeating those words to myself, like a mantra, when my phone buzzed a reminder at me.
Shit.
I'd spent so long up here screwing around that I'd made myself late for work.

I got to my feet and tossed my father's journal back into its cardboard coffin. Enough was enough. The time had come for me to stop living in the past—my father's past, especially. A lot of his old stuff had migrated downstairs to my bedroom—an embarrassing amount, I now realized. My room was practically a shrine to his memory. It was high time I grew up and moved some—if not all—of that crap back up here, where I'd found it. Where it belonged.

I'd get started on that tonight, I told myself as I shut the attic door behind me.

W
hen 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 Ray 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. Ray seemed to subsist primarily on a diet of high-fructose junk food and old videogames. It was hard not to love the guy.

Back before I was old enough to drive, I used to ride my bike over to Starbase Ace every day after school, just to bullshit about old videogames with Ray and kill time until my mom got off work at the hospital. Either he recognized me as a kindred spirit, or he just got tired of my chronic latchkey kid loitering and eventually offered me a job. I was overjoyed—even before I discovered that my new position as Assistant Sales Clerk involved about ten percent actual work and about ninety percent hanging out with Ray while we played videogames, cracked jokes, and ate junk food on the clock.

Ray once told me that he operated Starbase Ace “for kicks.” After making a boatload of dough on tech stocks during the dot com boom, he now wanted to enjoy his early retirement at the helm of his own private nerd lair, where he got to spend all day playing and talking about videogames with his like-minded clientele.

He was always saying he didn't give a damn if the store ever turned a profit—which was good, because it rarely did. Ray paid way too much for the used games we bought, and then immediately priced them for less than he'd just paid for them. He put everything on sale, all the time. He sold consoles, controllers, and hardware at no markup—to, as he put it, “foster customer loyalty and promote the gaming industry.”

Ray was also terrible at customer service. He made people wait at the register if he was in the middle of playing a game. He also loved to talk shit about people's game selections while he was ringing them up, if he thought they were buying a lame or easy title, and I'd seen him drive both children and adults out of the store with his opinions on everything from cheat codes to crop circles. He didn't seem to care if his rude behavior drove him out of business. I did, though, which made for a strange employee-employer relationship, since I was usually the one who had to scold him for not being more polite to our customers.

I fished my Starbase Ace nametag out of a drawer and pinned it on. A few years ago, as a joke, Ray had put his nickname for me on there, so now it read:
Hello! My name is ZACK ATTACK.
He didn't know that “Zack Attack” was also the name my peers had saddled me with after “the Incident” back in junior high.

I stood there stalling for a few more minutes, then forced myself to walk over to Smallberries, our second enormous sales PC. I clicked its mouse a few times and opened a search engine. I glanced at Ray to make sure he wasn't looking my way, then typed in the words:
Beaverton,
Oregon,
UFO,
and
flying saucer
.

The only hits that came back were references to Flying Saucer Pizza, a local restaurant. There were no recent UFO sightings mentioned on the local TV station or newspaper websites. If anyone else had seen the same ship I had, they still hadn't reported it. Or maybe there had been a report, but no one had taken it seriously?

I sighed and closed the browser window, then glanced back over at Ray. If there 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, crop circles, Area 51, and/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 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 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, and the EDA's largest and most impressive weapon, the Titan Warmech—a giant humanoid robot that looked like something out of an old Saturday morning cartoon.

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!
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 where 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.