“Zack, you can work here for as long as we manage to stay in business,” he said. “Honestly, though, you have to know you’re destined for much bigger things. Right?”
“Thanks, Ray,” I said, struggling not to roll my eyes. If today was any indication, the only thing I was destined for was a straitjacket. Maybe a padded helmet, too.
“ ‘You cannot escape your destiny,’ ” he said in his best Obi-Wan. Then he collapsed back onto his stool and fired up another Terra Firma mission with a click of his mouse. Chaos Terrain manufactured a wide variety of Terra Firma controllers, including the bestselling Titan Control System, a dual flight-stick rig that we sold right here in the store. But Ray never played with anything but a keyboard and mouse. He also still preferred a two-dimensional computer monitor to VR goggles, which he claimed gave him vertigo. Like a lot of gamers his age, Ray was set in his ways.
In spite of what I’d just said to him, I walked back over to Smallberries and clicked the Terra Firma icon on its desktop. The game’s opening cut scene began, and I almost hit “Skip Intro” out of habit. But then I let it play, rewatching it for the first time in years.
The intro’s somber opening voice-over (performed by Morgan Freeman, killing it like always) briefly laid out the game’s basic storyline. It was set sometime “in the mid twenty-first century,” roughly ten years after Earth was first invaded by the Sobrukai, an aquatic race hailing from the Tau Ceti star system, a popular point-of-origin for aliens since the dawn of sci-fi, due to its close proximity to Earth. The Sobrukai somewhat resembled the giant squids of Earth, but with an added mane of spiked tentacles and a vertical shark-like mouth ringed by six soulless, black eyes.
The game’s intro segued into a video transmission the invaders had sent to humanity on the day of their arrival, containing a threatening message from the Sobrukai overlord, whose Weta designers had gone way too Giger in my humble opinion. The gray translucent-skinned creature was shown floating in its dark underwater lair, its tentacles splayed out behind it, addressing the camera in its grating native language, which sounded sort of like a whale’s song, if the whale in question was into death metal.
Thankfully, someone turned on the English subtitles just before the overlord began to make his evil alien species’ somewhat clichéd intentions known.
“We are the Sobrukai,” it said. “And we declare your pitiful species to be unworthy of survival. You shall therefore be eradicated—”
There was more to the overlord’s message, but I hit the space bar to skip over it. I remembered the highlights. These malevolent unfeeling inkfish had traveled twelve light-years across interstellar space to wipe out humanity and then knock down all of our Pizza Huts, so that they could seize our rare blue jewel of a world as their own. It was my mission to use my baller videogame skills to stop them. Boo-yah. Press fire to continue.
The whole convoluted backstory behind humanity’s ongoing war with the Sobrukai was available online, but gamers had to piece it together by digging through an elaborate network of Earth Defense Alliance websites—an alternate-reality game element meant to help players immerse themselves in the game’s narrative. According to the information buried on those sites, at some point during the onset of the Sobrukai invasion a decade ago, the EDA had somehow managed to capture one of the aliens’ ships undamaged, and then they had reverse-engineered all of its incredibly advanced weaponry, communication, life support, and propulsion technology—seemingly overnight—and then used it to construct a massive global arsenal of combat drones that were capable of going toe-to-toe with the Sobrukai.
Of course, the developers never bothered to explain how the EDA’s scientists managed to accomplish these amazing feats in such a short time span while fending off constant attacks from the Sobrukai’s vastly superior technology—but the way I saw it, if you were willing to suspend your disbelief enough to believe that a race of anthropomorphic extraterrestrial squids from Tau Ceti had been using an armada of remote-controlled robots to wage war on humanity for the past decade, it was pretty silly to nitpick over plot holes and scientific inaccuracies. Especially if they justified evil alien overlords and dogfighting in space.