Ray was also terrible at customer service. He made people wait at the register if he was in the middle of playing a game. He also loved to talk shit about people’s game selections while he was ringing them up, if he thought they were buying a lame or easy title, and I’d seen him drive both children and adults out of the store with his opinions on everything from cheat codes to crop circles. He didn’t seem to care if his rude behavior drove him out of business. I did, though, which made for a strange employee-employer relationship, since I was usually the one who had to scold him for not being more polite to our customers.
I fished my Starbase Ace nametag out of a drawer and pinned it on. A few years ago, as a joke, Ray had put his nickname for me on there, so now it read: Hello! My name is ZACK ATTACK. He didn’t know that “Zack Attack” was also the name my peers had saddled me with after “the Incident” back in junior high.
I stood there stalling for a few more minutes, then forced myself to walk over to Smallberries, our second enormous sales PC. I clicked its mouse a few times and opened a search engine. I glanced at Ray to make sure he wasn’t looking my way, then typed in the words: Beaverton, Oregon, UFO, and flying saucer.
The only hits that came back were references to Flying Saucer Pizza, a local restaurant. There were no recent UFO sightings mentioned on the local TV station or newspaper websites. If anyone else had seen the same ship I had, they still hadn’t reported it. Or maybe there had been a report, but no one had taken it seriously?
I sighed and closed the browser window, then glanced back over at Ray. If there was anyone I could have told about the Glaive Fighter, it was him. Ray seemed to believe that everything happening in the world was somehow connected to Roswell, crop circles, Area 51, and/or Hangar 18. He’d told me on numerous occasions that he believed aliens had already made first contact with humanity decades ago, and that our leaders were still covering it up all these years later because “the sheeple of Earth” weren’t ready to hear the truth yet.
But UFO cover-ups and alien abductions were one thing. Seeing a fictional alien spacecraft from a bestselling videogame series buzzing your town made even the craziest Roswell conspiracy theories seem sane by comparison. Besides, how was I supposed to walk over to Ray and tell him with a straight face that I’d seen a Sobrukai fighter buzzing our town—when he was, at that very moment, doing battle with that very same fictional alien race?
I walked over to get a better view of his huge monitor. Ray was playing the same videogame he’d been playing pretty much nonstop for the past few years—Terra Firma, a wildly popular first-person shooter published by Chaos Terrain, the same developer behind Armada. Both games shared the same near-future alien invasion storyline, in which Earth was being attacked by the “Sobrukai,” a race of ill-tempered anthropomorphic squid-like creatures from Tau Ceti V who were hell-bent on exterminating all of humanity, for one of the usual bullshit reasons—they wanted our sweet-ass M-Class planet, and sharing shit just wasn’t in their cephalopod nature.
Like nearly every race of evil alien invaders in the history of science fiction, the Sobrukai were somehow technologically advanced enough to construct huge warships capable of crossing interstellar space, and yet still not smart enough to terraform a lifeless world to suit their needs, instead of going through the huge hassle of trying to conquer one that was already inhabited—especially one inhabited by billions of nuke-wielding apes who generally don’t cotton to strangers being on their land. No, the Sobrukai just had to have Earth for some reason, and they were determined to Kill All Humans before they took possession. Luckily for us, like so many made-up evil alien invaders before them, the Sobrukai also seemed intent on exterminating us as slowly and inefficiently as possible. Instead of just wiping out humanity with a meteor or a killer virus or a few old-fashioned long-range nuclear weapons, the squids had opted to wage prolonged World War II–style air and ground war against us—while somehow allowing all of their advanced weapons, propulsion, and communications technology to fall into their primitive enemy’s hands.
In both Armada and Terra Firma, you played a human recruit in the Earth Defense Alliance, tasked with using a variety of ground-based combat drones to fight off the invasion. Each drone in the EDA’s arsenal was designed to serve as a direct match for a similar type of drone used by the alien enemy.