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 fa?ade. It had cost Ray 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.
Ray once told me that he operated Starbase Ace “for kicks.” After making a boatload of dough on tech stocks during the dot com boom, he now wanted to enjoy his early retirement at the helm of his own private nerd lair, where he got to spend all day playing and talking about videogames with his like-minded clientele.
He was always saying he didn’t give a damn if the store ever turned a profit—which was good, because it rarely did. Ray paid way too much for the used games we bought, and then immediately priced them for less than he’d just paid for them. He put everything on sale, all the time. He sold consoles, controllers, and hardware at no markup—to, as he put it, “foster customer loyalty and promote the gaming industry.”