01H33M43S REMAINING.
WHEN I REACHED the Thunderdome, I didn’t think there was anyone else there at first. Then the canopy of one of the drone controller pods slid open, and my father climbed out of it. He smiled at me, but I turned away as soon as our eyes met and walked over to one of the other pods. Just as I was beginning to lower myself into it, my father crouched at the edge of the oval-shaped pit and looked down at me.
“I’m sorry, Zack,” he said. “I shouldn’t have dumped all of that on you. It was too much, after everything else you’ve been through today.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Thanks for listening,” he said. “You’re a good listener, just like your mom.” He looked away. “I just—I’ve been waiting for a long time to talk with you about all that.…”
He trailed off. I lifted my eyes to meet his gaze but didn’t respond.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I’m still trying to process all of it,” I replied. “I don’t know what to believe.”
He nodded. I hit the button to close my control pod’s canopy. It slid shut between us, ending the conversation—or at least postponing it temporarily.
I sat in my simulated cockpit with my eyes closed, trying to collect my thoughts. I didn’t have much luck.
SOMETIME LATER, I heard my father greet Debbie, Chén, and Whoadie. Milo, Shin, and Graham a few minutes after that.
When the countdown clock hit the one-hour mark, we all gathered in front of the command station to watch the president of the United States address the nation from the Oval Office on live television. She smiled reassuringly at the camera, but the fear in her eyes was evident.
“My fellow Americans,” she began. “At this very moment, the leaders of every nation around the world are about to show their citizens the same briefing film I’m about to show you, which will explain the alarming situation that now faces all of humanity.”
Debbie was standing nearby, staring down at her QComm display, waiting for the moment when she could finally call her boys. But our phones were still locked. I glanced over at Chén, Shin, and Graham, who were each focused on other, smaller display screens mounted nearby—the ones that showed the leaders of their respective countries making a similar introduction. A second later, the faces of the US and Chinese presidents, and of the Japanese and British prime ministers, vanished from the display screens and the Earth Defense Alliance logo appeared on each of them.
“In 1973, NASA discovered the first evidence of a nonterrestrial intelligence, right here in our very own solar system,” Sagan’s voice-over began, “when the Pioneer 10 spacecraft sent back the first close-up photograph of Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon.”
The eight of us stood there, clustered together in a tight knot, and rewatched the entire film, this time with the knowledge that the rest of humanity was seeing it, too.
When the film ended, the president’s face reappeared, and she told the world what Admiral Vance had told all of us at Crystal Palace earlier that morning—which now felt like an entire lifetime ago. Once the president finished revealing the bad news about the approaching alien armada, the networks began replaying her address, with increasingly alarming headlines superimposed across the screen, along with footage showing the stunned and panicked reactions of average people.
As I watched the chaos unfold in the array of video windows before me, I thought about my mother, and my friends, and everyone else trapped down there.
Would the EDA’s plan really work? Would our civilization collapse in the wake of the revelation that we were about to be invaded by aliens, or had the EDA subconsciously prepared us enough to deal with it, as they’d hoped?
Would humanity cower in fear, or stand its ground and fight back?
I stared at the screens, wondering which one it would be.
Shin pulled up dozens of different television networks from all over the world and displayed them on the dome side by side, along with more video feeds from the Internet.
We watched as the initial wave of panic spread across the globe—footage of people freaking out on crowded city streets and stampeding out of sports stadiums. But the world seemed to take the news incredibly well. If there were riots, mass suicides, and lootings going on, no one was reporting them—or even posting videos of them online.
Within minutes, it seemed like the same newscasters who had delivered the news were now reporting with total confidence that most of the world’s civilian population was already responding to the EDA’s call to arms, and that hundreds of millions of people all over the world were already mobilizing themselves by logging on to the EDA’s online operations servers to enlist and then receive their combat drone assignments and take up arms and defend the planet. Several networks were showing clips of people abandoning their cars in traffic to run into electronics stores and libraries and coffee shops and Internet cafés and office buildings, thousands upon thousands of people, all in a mad dash to get somewhere with broadband Internet access.
There was no way the news networks could’ve pulled together all that footage so quickly (and then edited it together for broadcast). And at this stage, it would be impossible to know whether or not a majority of the world’s population was prepared to join the Earth Defense Alliance and fight to defend our home. This had to be the EDA at work, convincing media outlets that our best chance at survival was to tell the reassuring lie. And they were right—if people believed that humanity was already uniting itself under the EDA’s banner, they were far more likely to join the fight themselves.
I thought again of the note my father had scribbled in his notebook so long ago:
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!
Thirty- and sixty-second-long “public service announcements” began to run amid the news bulletins, each designed to inform the world’s civilian population of the EDA’s plan and show them how to use their computer or mobile device to enlist in the Earth Defense Alliance online and “help save the world!”
The best PSA was one that opened with a shot of a brother and sister sitting on the couch in their living room. The boy is playing Armada on their giant television, while the girl sits beside him playing Terra Firma on her handheld tablet. On their screens, we can see that she’s operating an ATHID infantry drone while he pilots a WASP quadcopter. Both of them are trying to take down a towering alien Basilisk stomping its way through a suburban neighborhood. On the TV screen, we see the Behemoth lurch forward and step on the corner of a house, crushing it under one of its massive metal feet—and at that same moment, the wall of the kids’ living room also collapses, revealing that it was their house the giant robot just stepped on. The two kids aren’t playing a game—they’re defending their home! Their parents cower behind the couch, watching as their two children do battle with the giant alien machine, with the help of hundreds of other drones operated by their neighbors. When the Behemoth explodes under a hail of enemy fire, the parents whip out their smartphones and use them to take control of two more drones and join the battle, too. It reminded me of one of those old toy commercials that ended with the line “And Mom and Dad can play along, too!”
When I couldn’t bear to watch the news feeds any longer, I climbed into my control pod and closed the canopy, then made it nontransparent, creating my own private isolation chamber.
I sat there in the darkness for a while, listening to myself breathe. Then I took out my QComm and queued up a song I’d first discovered on one of my father’s old mixtapes. It was a great rock instrumental by Pink Floyd that I’d often used to psych myself up before a big Armada mission.
I played it over and over, each time mouthing the words to the single lyric spoken in the middle of the song: “One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces.”
01H00M00S REMAINING.
WHEN THE COUNTDOWN clock showed only one hour remaining, all of our QComms beeped in unison. A notice on my display told me that the EDA had finally unlocked our QComms’ access to the public phone system. Graham, Debbie, Whoadie, Milo, and Chén each climbed into their individual drone controller pods and then closed their canopies, to give themselves some privacy for their calls home.
Shin didn’t call anyone. Instead, he picked up his bass guitar, and, in what seemed like an odd coincidence, he began to play a solo version of “One of These Days” while staring up at the stars projected on the dome over our heads. Then I noticed a practice set list taped to the floor in front of him, and saw that several of the songs listed there were tracks I knew from my father’s old mixtapes.
My father was off by himself, too, sitting at the command center console. When I walked over to join him, I saw that he was staring at my mother’s contact information on his QComm’s display screen.
“Are you going to call her?” I asked, making him jump slightly.