Armada (Page 47)

I really miss both of you, but I have to admit that it’s also kind of amazing up here. My whole life, I felt like I was destined to do something important, but I was only ever good at videogames, which I always figured would be completely useless. But it’s not useless, and neither am I. I think this is what I was always destined to do with my life. I just never knew it.

My whole existence is classified now, so I’m not even allowed to send you birthday cards while I’m away. But I’m still going to write you, as often as I can, and I’ll save the letters until I can give them to you. I’m going to write to your mom, too. It’s only been a few days, but I already miss both of you a lot.

I hope you’re both doing okay—and I hope my funeral wasn’t too hard on your mom, or you, even though you’re not even a year old yet, so you won’t remember being there, but she will, and thinking about how hard that must have been for her makes me feel like jumping off a cliff. Of course, I realize now—I already jumped. That’s why I’m stuck up here.

Anyway, I promise to write again soon, when I have more time. I’ll tell you about everything that has happened to me, and all about this moon base where I live. But right now, I have to go defend Earth from alien invaders.

Love,

Xavier (Your Dad)

I kept on reading, devouring letter after letter.

His early letters filled in missing details of the story I’d already pieced together from reading his old Theory notebook. My father described in detail how he’d begun to uncover facets of the EDA’s grand conspiracy in the years before they recruited him, after his encounter with the strange Phaëton game at his local arcade. He would later learn that the same prototype was used to recruit Shin, Graham, and Admiral Vance.

After he was inducted, my father’s longtime suspicions were confirmed—the EDA had been tracking him ever since he was in grade school. He’d been moved to the top of their watch list after he’d mailed in dozens of fuzzy Polaroids of his record high scores to Activision. But the EDA deemed him ineligible for early recruitment, due to some “troubling results” in the preliminary psych evaluation they did on him. That was why they didn’t actually recruit my father until much later, when he was nineteen—shortly after he became a father. One morning, two men in black suits showed up during his lunch break and abducted him from his job. They took him to one of their secret installations and showed him an earlier version of the EDA briefing film I’d been shown and gave him a choice—he could either join the EDA and use his videogame skills to try to help save humanity, or, he could, as he said, “puss out and keep wading through sewage for a living, until aliens show up and destroy our planet, along with my wife, my baby boy, and everyone else I know and love.”

What choice did I have, Zack? I didn’t want to leave you two, but I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing while that happened. So I said yes, even though I knew it meant I might never see you and your mother again. If I died protecting the two of you and our home, then I figured it would be worth it.

Imprisonment. That was what he began to call it.

In every letter I opened, my father repeated the same apologies, marking and lamenting every single missed birthday or Christmas. For him, every milestone of my childhood and adolescence had been a double-edged sword. Watching me grow to manhood brought him joy, even from such a great distance. But that joy was always tinged with the bitter agony he felt at having missed every last second of it, and the knowledge of the pain caused by his absence.

Once a month, he wrote, the EDA would send him updates about my mother and me. He looked forward to them like holidays. In the interim, he scoured the Internet for any additional scrap of news about us he could find in a local paper or on my school’s website. Every time he received a new photo of me, he wrote about it in his letters in endless detail, going on and on about how big I was getting. About how much he’d missed me and my mom, more and more every year.

He wrote to me about his day-to-day life as an elite Moon Base Alpha drone pilot. He recounted the details of the battles he fought each year, during the Jovian Opposition. He wrote about his hopes for victory, and about his fear of “the coming war.” My father used that phrase often in his letters. “The coming war.” It made me realize how terrible it must have been for him, to have this conflict hanging over his head all these years. He had lived his whole adult life with this terrible burden, knowing that the End of Everything was coming, and that it was drawing closer every second.

In one letter, he confessed that he’d stopped dreading the coming invasion. “Now I long for it to begin,” he wrote. “Because, one way or another, it will put an end to my misery—and my imprisonment here.”

He wrote: “I miss you and your mother so much I can barely stand it sometimes.”

And then, half a dozen letters later, he wrote, “I just can’t stand it anymore.”

Another letter said he’d gone “a little nuts for a while.” He wrote about how they put him on antidepressants. When things got really bad, he took tranquilizers sometimes, too. And he was required to videoconference with a shrink back on Earth twice a week.

He wrote that they kept giving him medals, but they no longer meant anything to him. He just wanted to go home. But he couldn’t, because it was his job to make sure humanity still had a home when this was all over. Besides, he knew the EDA wouldn’t let him go home now, anyway, because he’d asked them—repeatedly. But they told him he was far too valuable an asset, and that the world needed him right where he was. So instead, he’d started to beg the EDA to give him just a few hours of shore leave, so he could visit his family and remember what it was he was up here fighting for. They told him that would be too big of a security risk, and that if anyone learned he was still alive, especially his family, it could jeopardize everything he had worked for and sacrificed for all of these years.

As difficult as it had been for me to grow up without knowing my father, I now realized that the years we’d spent apart had been even more difficult for him. For the past seventeen years, I’d been living an idyllic life in the suburbs with Mom, surrounded by friends and all of the comforts of home. My father had spent those years here, in this desolate place on the far side of the moon, all alone, and for all he knew, completely forgotten by his loved ones.

FINALLY I GOT curious and jumped ahead to the collection of video messages he’d recorded. I clicked on the most recent one, dated less than a week ago. The timestamp said it was just after two o’clock in the morning, by MBA time.

My father was sitting in a large dark room—larger than his quarters. It was some part of the base I didn’t recognize. His unshaven face was just inches from his QComm, and his paranoid, bloodshot eyes filled half of the video frame. As he sat there in the dark, rambling into his QComm’s video camera, he looked and sounded just like a raving, straitjacketed asylum patient—more specifically, a lot like Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys.

“There’s something I have to do,” he said. “Something I can’t tell you about, until I see you in person. But I don’t know if Vance will really honor my request and station you up here with me—if he doesn’t, I need you to know something.”

He stared into the camera lens, seeming to search for the right words.

“What if figuring out the aliens’ true motives is the only way to beat them?” He shrugged and glanced away. “Or at least survive them? At this point, I think surviving might be humanity’s best-case scenario.” He looked back into the lens. “I hope all of this makes sense to you, if and when you actually ever get to see it. If you do—please forgive me, Son. For everything. And no matter what people call me—no matter what they say about my own actions, I want you to know that I did what I felt I had to do—to protect you and your mom, and everyone else back on Earth. Please know that I did what I did because I didn’t think I had any other choice. If you’re still alive to see this message, you’ll know I made the right one.”

He stared expectantly at the camera for a few more seconds, as if he actually expected someone to respond. Then he tapped the screen in front of him, and his image winked out.

I yanked out the flash drive and pocketed it. Then I knelt to grab my EDA rucksack. My old canvas backpack was stuffed inside, along with my father’s old patch-covered leather jacket. I slung the pack over my shoulder, then continued out the exit.

I walked down the empty corridor to my father’s quarters. The door hissed open for me automatically as soon as I came within range of its retinal scanner, and I saw my father sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, strapped into an Armada Interceptor Flight Control System like the one I had at home. He was wearing VR goggles and a pair of noise-canceling headphones, and didn’t appear to notice me come in. I could tell that he was playing an Armada practice mission with Shin and Milo, because he kept saying their call signs, followed by his trademark RedJive catchphrase, which he uttered each time he blasted one of his opponents’ ships to virtual smithereens.

“You’re welcome. You’re welcome. Oh, and you’re quite welcome, too.”