Armada

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, eyeing 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.”

I smiled and nodded in agreement. But she still didn’t budge.

“I’m not trying to pressure you, honey,” she said. “I just want you to have a plan.”

“My plan for right now,” I slowly told my mother, “is to keep on working at Starbase Ace. Maybe switch from part-time to full-time—”

“That’s an after-school job, Zack, not a long-term career plan. Think about what it would be like five years from now. Everyone else will be finishing college and starting a career, and you—”

“I’ll still be sitting on my ass all day, five blocks from where I graduated, working the same crappy retail job I had when I was sixteen?” I finished for her.

“Exactly.”

I tried to look hurt. “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”

“You’re going to find my foot jammed disturbingly far up your ass if you don’t stop screwing around and start making a serious plan for your future, mister.”

“When you call me ‘mister’ I know you’re being super serious,” I said.

“I’m not saying that you have to go to college, honey. Join a monastery! Join the Peace Corps! Join the fucking X-Men—I don’t care what you do, as long as you do something. Okay?”

I pretended to sigh heavily in relief.

“In that case, maybe I’ll run off and join the circus,” I said. “I could start out as a weight guesser, then maybe work my way up to operating the Tilt-A-Whirl.”

“I think you might have a few too many teeth for that line of work, smart-ass,” she said, giving me a playful shove. “I’m not trying to give you a hard time, ace. I just want the best for you. You’re so smart and talented, honey. You can do great things.” She looked me in the eyes. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I know, Ma,” I said. “Try not to worry, okay?”

She frowned and continued to block my path, arms folded to indicate that getting past her wasn’t going to be that easy. But then, like a gift from the gods, my phone chimed to inform me I had a new text message. I fumbled it out of my pocket and studied its display: Urgent Reminder—Earth Defense Alliance Command—Lt. Lightman, you are ordered to log in for your mission briefing at 8pm PST.

I also saw that Cruz and Diehl had each sent me multiple text messages, asking what the hell had happened in class, and if I was still down for our Armada mission.

“Sorry, Ma, I gotta run!” I said, holding up my phone like it was some sort of hall pass. “I’m late for my Armada mission—it starts in just a few minutes!”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I know. Late for a videogame.” She stepped out of my way. “Go on. Go get ’em, Maverick.”

“Thanks!” I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, which briefly inverted her frown. Then I grabbed the Armada controller box as I ran up the stairs and then down the hall, eager to reach the safety of my bedroom and the portal to another reality that lay beyond it.

But my mother’s voice traveled faster than I did, and her final shouted warning reached my ears before I could clear the Neutral Zone. It was something I’d heard her say countless times growing up, and usually it made me want to roll my eyes at her. But this time, her words filled me with a genuine sense of dread.

“I know the future is scary at times, sweetheart. But there’s just no escaping it.”

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 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.