Armada (6 page)

Arbogast had then assembled a dream team of creative consultants and contractors to help make his bold claim a reality, luring some of the videogame industry's brightest stars away from their own companies and projects, with the sole promise of collaborating on his groundbreaking new MMOs. That was how gaming legends like Richard Garriott, Yu Suzuki, Gabe Newell, Warren Spector, Tim Schafer, and Shigeru Miyamoto had all wound up as consultants on both
Terra Firma
and
Armada
—along with several big Hollywood filmmakers, including James Cameron, who had contributed to the EDA's realistic ship and mech designs, and Peter Jackson, whose Weta Workshop had rendered all of the in-game cinematics.

Chaos Terrain had also licensed the most advanced game engines; then they set about modifying and improving them for their specific needs.
Terra Firma
utilized code and design features from several different combat-simulation game series like
Battlefield, Call of Duty,
and
Modern Warfare
.
Armada,
on the other hand, had been created using a heavily modified version of the game engine for
Star Citizen,
which Chaos Terrain had licensed from Roberts Space Industries for an undisclosed sum.

This plagiaristic, Frankenstein-like development strategy proved wildly successful.
Terra Firma
and
Armada
were two of the bestselling multiplayer videogames in the world, and with good reason. Their stripped-down arcade-style gameplay made both titles easy to learn and fun for casual players, but they were also scalable and dynamic enough to be challenging for everyday players like myself. Both games also had killer production values, and they could be played on any modern gaming platform, including smartphones and tablets. Best of all, the games weren't overpriced, like most MMOs. Sure, Chaos Terrain charged a low monthly subscription fee to play both
Terra Firma
and
Armada,
but once you got good enough to achieve the rank of officer in either game, CT waived your monthly fee and you played for free from then on. And they didn't use in-game microtransactions to milk players for extra revenue, either.

I closed the window and stared at the icons on the desktop, trying to sort out my thoughts. Until today, it had never occurred to me to make a connection between the alien invasion plotline of Chaos Terrain's games and the conspiracy theory outlined in my father's notebook. There were hundreds of alien-invasion-themed movies, shows, books, and videogames released every year, and
Armada
was just one of them. Besides, the game had only been out for a few years, so how could it possibly be connected to the stuff my father had written in his notebook decades ago?

On the other hand, if the government really did want to train average citizens to operate drones in combat, then multiplayer combat games like
Armada
and
Terra Firma
would be exactly the sort of the games you'd create to do it. …

When the
Star Trek
door chime sounded a few minutes later and a gaggle of semi-regulars from the nearby junior high filed into the store, I shoved my new helmet, throttle, and flight-stick controllers back into their box and stowed it under the counter before any of the prepubescent hooligans could lay their covetous eyes upon it.

“Welcome to Starbase Ace, where the game is never over,” I said, reciting the store's canned greeting with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. “How may I help you young gentlemen this evening?”

W
hen 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 a lot of nights she didn't get home until after I'd already crashed for the night.

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 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.

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 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?”

Her question made my spider-sense tingle. My mom only offered to make me breakfast-for-dinner when she wanted to have a “serious talk” with me.

“Thanks, but I had pizza at work,” I said, inching backward. “I'm kinda stuffed.”

She moved between me and the staircase, blocking my escape.

“You shall not pass!” she declared, stomping her foot down theatrically on the carpet.

“Your vice principal called me a little while ago,” she said. “He told me you ditched math class early today—right after you tried to pick a fight with Douglas Knotcher.”

I looked at her face and fought down a wave of anger, instead forcing myself to see how worried and upset she was, and how much she was trying to hide it.

“I wasn't trying to pick a fight, Mom,” I said. “He was tormenting this other kid who sits near me. He's been bullying him for weeks. And I ran out of there because it was the only way to stop myself from tearing Knotcher's head off. You should be proud of me.”

She studied my face for a moment; then she sighed and kissed me on the cheek.

“Okay, kiddo,” she said, hugging me. “I know it isn't easy being stuck in that zoo. Just tough it out for a few more months and then you'll be free. Captain of your own destiny.”

“I know, Ma,” I said. “Two months. I'll make it. No worries.”

“Remember,” she added, biting her lip. “You're not a minor anymore. …”

“I know,” I said. “Don't worry. Nothing like that will ever happen again, okay?”

She nodded. I could see that she was thinking about the Incident. The Incident that I'd just promised her, for the thousandth time, would never happen again.

Here's what would never happen again:

One morning, a few weeks after I started seventh grade, I was walking past Knotcher and a few of his friends in the hallway when he smiled at me and said, “Hey, Lightman! Is it true your old man was dumb enough to die in a shit-factory explosion?”

I'm not paraphrasing. That's a direct quote. There were eyewitnesses.

The next thing I remember, I was sitting on Knotcher's chest, staring down at his motionless, blood-drenched face, amid a cacophony of screams from our classmates. Then I felt a tangle of strong arms around my neck and torso, pulling me up and off of him—and found myself wondering why my knuckles were in agony, and why Knotcher was now curled in a bleeding heap on the waxed marble floor in front of me.

Afterward, they said I attacked him “like a wild animal” and beat him unconscious. They said I kept right on beating him, even after he went limp.

Apparently it took two other boys and a teacher to finally pull me off of him.

Knotcher spent a week in the hospital recovering from a mild concussion and a fractured jaw. I got off pretty light, considering—a two-week suspension and mandatory anger-management therapy the remainder of the school year, along with the nickname “Zack Attack” and a permanent reputation as the class psycho.

Far worse than any of that was the terrible ten-second gap the Incident had left in my memory, and the question it'd forced me to ask myself nearly every day since: What would I have done if there had been no one there to stop me?

Knotcher had probably seen a scan of father's old newspaper obituary online. It was one of the only results that came up when you searched for his name. That was the way I'd learned how he'd died. My mother and grandparents had kept the details of his death from me while I was growing up—and I'm thankful they did, because that obituary had haunted me since the moment I'd first read it. I still had every word memorized:

A Beaverton man was killed at approximately 9am Friday in an accident at the city's wastewater treatment plant on South River Road. Dead is Xavier Ulysses Lightman, 19, of 603 Bluebonnet Ave., an employee of the city of Beaverton. The Washington County Coroner pronounced Lightman dead at the scene. Lightman was working near a storage tank when an undetected methane leak rendered him unconscious. Investigators surmised a spark from an exposed electrical circuit ignited the gas, and Lightman was killed instantly in the subsequent explosion. A lifetime resident of Beaverton, Lightman is survived by his wife, Pamela, and son, Zackary. Funeral arrangements—

“Zack, are you even listening to me right now?”

“Of course I am, Mom,” I lied. “What were you saying?”

“I said that your guidance counselor, Mr. Russell, left me a voicemail, too.” She folded her arms. “He said you missed your last two career counseling sessions.”

“Sorry—I must have forgotten,” I said. “I'll go to the next one, okay? I promise.”

I tried to slip past her again, but she blocked my path and then stomped her foot down in front of me again, pretending like she was Gandalf and I was the balrog.

“Did you finally make a decision?” she asked, eying me.

“You mean, did I decide what I want to do with the rest of my life?”

She nodded. I took a deep breath and said the first thing that came to mind.

“Well, I have thought about this quite a bit, and after careful consideration, I've 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 whisper, then smiled. “You know, Zack,” she said, “you can enroll in college even if you're still not sure what you want to study. You just take a bunch of different courses and see what interests you. You'll figure out what you want to do eventually.”