I smiled down at the list. I’d never even heard of Iron Eagle until I saw it mentioned in my father’s journal and watched the VHS copy of it I found among his things. The film had instantly become one of my go- to guilty-pleasure movies. The hero of Iron Eagle is an Air Force brat named Doug Masters who learns to pilot an F-16 by cutting class to sneak into the base flight simulator—really just an incredibly expensive videogame. Doug is a natural pilot, but only if he’s rocking out to his favorite tunes. When his dad gets shot down overseas and is taken captive, Doug steals two F-16s and flies over to rescue him, with a little help from Lou Gossett Jr., his Walkman, Twisted Sister, and Queen.
The result was a cinematic masterpiece—although sadly, it appeared to be recognized as such by me alone. Cruz and Diehl had both vowed never to sit through another screening of it. Muffit was still always happy to curl up and watch it with me, though, and our repeated viewings of the film, along with the Snoopy vs. the Red Baron album my mother insisted on playing every Christmas, had served as the inspiration for my Armada pilot call sign: IronBeagle. (When I posted in the Armada player forums, my avatar was an image of Snoopy in his World War I flying ace getup.)
I glanced back at his timeline once again. My father had drawn circles around the entries for Iron Eagle, Ender’s Game, and The Last Starfighter; then he’d added lines connecting them all to each other—and now for the first time I finally understood why. All three stories were about a kid who trained for real-life combat by playing a videogame simulation of it.
I kept flipping pages until I came to the journal’s second-to-last entry. In the center of an empty page my father had written the following question:
What if they’re using videogames to train us to fight without us even knowing it? Like Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, when he made Daniel-san paint his house, sand his deck, and wax all of his cars—he was training him and he didn’t even realize it!
Wax on, wax off—but on a global scale!
The journal’s final entry was an undated, rambling, half-illegible, four-page-long essay in which my father attempted to summarize the threads of his half-formed conspiracy theory and link them together.
“The entire videogame industry is secretly under the control of the US military,” he wrote. “They may have even invented the videogame industry! WHY?”
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 nitroglycerin 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.
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. 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.