He cocked an eyebrow at me. “What’s wrong with you?” he said. “You sick?”
I looked away. “No, I’m fine,” I replied. “Why?”
“Your boss just offered you a chance to play your favorite videogame at work, on the clock, and you turn it down?” He reached out to touch my forehead. “You got a brain fever or something, kid?”
I laughed uneasily and shook my head. “No, it’s just—I recently vowed to stop goofing off so much here at work, regardless of how much you encourage me to.”
“Why in the hell would you do that?”
“It’s all part of my master plan,” I said. “To show you how responsible and reliable I’ve become, so you’ll hire me on as a full-time employee after I graduate.”
He shot me the same perturbed look he always seemed to give me whenever I brought up this subject.
“Zack, you can work here for as long as we manage to stay in business,” he said. “Honestly, though, you have to know you’re destined for much bigger things. Right?”
“Thanks, Ray,” I said, struggling not to roll my eyes. If today was any indication, the only thing I was destined for was a straitjacket. Maybe a padded helmet, too.
“ ‘You cannot escape your destiny,’ ” he said in his best Obi-Wan. Then he collapsed back onto his stool and fired up another Terra Firma mission with a click of his mouse. Chaos Terrain manufactured a wide variety of Terra Firma controllers, including the bestselling Titan Control System, a dual flight-stick rig that we sold right here in the store. But Ray never played with anything but a keyboard and mouse. He also still preferred a two-dimensional computer monitor to VR goggles, which he claimed gave him vertigo. Like a lot of gamers his age, Ray was set in his ways.
In spite of what I’d just said to him, I walked back over to Smallberries and clicked the Terra Firma icon on its desktop. The game’s opening cut scene began, and I almost hit “Skip Intro” out of habit. But then I let it play, rewatching it for the first time in years.
The intro’s somber opening voice-over (performed by Morgan Freeman, killing it like always) briefly laid out the game’s basic storyline. It was set sometime “in the mid twenty-first century,” roughly ten years after Earth was first invaded by the Sobrukai, an aquatic race hailing from the Tau Ceti star system, a popular point-of-origin for aliens since the dawn of sci-fi, due to its close proximity to Earth. The Sobrukai somewhat resembled the giant squids of Earth, but with an added mane of spiked tentacles and a vertical shark-like mouth ringed by six soulless black eyes.
The game’s intro segued into a video transmission the invaders had sent to humanity on the day of their arrival, containing a threatening message from the Sobrukai overlord, whose Weta designers had gone way too Giger in my humble opinion. The gray translucent-skinned creature was shown floating in its dark underwater lair, its tentacles splayed out behind it, addressing the camera in its grating native language, which sounded sort of like a whale’s song, if the whale in question was into death metal.
Thankfully, someone turned on the English subtitles just before the overlord began to make his evil alien species’ somewhat clichéd intentions known.
“We are the Sobrukai,” it said. “And we declare your pitiful species to be unworthy of survival. You shall therefore be eradicated—”
There was more to the overlord’s message, but I hit the space bar to skip over it. I remembered the highlights. These malevolent unfeeling inkfish had traveled twelve light-years across interstellar space to wipe out humanity and then knock down all of our Pizza Huts, so that they could seize our rare blue jewel of a world as their own. It was my mission to use my baller videogame skills to stop them. Boo-yah. Press FIRE to continue.
The whole convoluted backstory behind humanity’s ongoing war with the Sobrukai was available online, but gamers had to piece it together by digging through an elaborate network of Earth Defense Alliance websites—an alternate-reality game element meant to help players immerse themselves in the game’s narrative. According to the information buried on those sites, at some point during the onset of the Sobrukai invasion a decade ago, the EDA had somehow managed to capture one of the aliens’ ships undamaged, and then they had reverse-engineered all of its incredibly advanced weaponry, communication, life support, and propulsion technology—seemingly overnight—and then used it to construct a massive global arsenal of combat drones that were capable of going toe-to-toe with the Sobrukai.
Of course, the developers never bothered to explain how the EDA’s scientists managed to accomplish these amazing feats in such a short time span while fending off constant attacks from the Sobrukai’s vastly superior technology—but the way I saw it, if you were willing to suspend your disbelief enough to believe that a race of anthropomorphic extraterrestrial squids from Tau Ceti had been using an armada of remote-controlled robots to wage war on humanity for the past decade, it was pretty silly to nitpick over plot holes and scientific inaccuracies. Especially if they justified evil alien overlords and dogfighting in space.
I closed the Terra Firma client and opened a web browser; then I pulled up Chaos Terrain’s website. I clicked through to their website’s “About Us” page and scanned it. As a longtime CT super fan, I already knew quite a lot about the company’s history. It had been founded back in 2010 by a Bay Area videogame developer named Finn Arbogast, who quit a lucrative job working on the Battlefield series for Electronic Arts to venture out on his own. He founded Chaos Terrain with the lofty goal of “creating the next generation of multiplayer VR games.”
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 Chris Roberts, Richard Garriott, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Gabe Newell, 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 created its own custom games engine for both Terra Firma and Armada, using many of the same programmers who had worked on previous combat-simulation game series like Battlefield, Call of Duty, and Modern Warfare, and on existing aerial and space combat simulators like Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous, and EVE Online.
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 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?”
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.