“Yeah, yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I know. Late for a videogame.” She stepped out of my way. “Go on. Go get ’em, Maverick.”
“Thanks!” I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, which briefly inverted her frown. Then I grabbed the camouflaged Armada controller box as I ran up the stairs and then down the hall, eager to reach the safety of my bedroom and the portal to another reality that lay beyond it.
But my mother’s voice traveled faster than I did, and her final shouted warning reached my ears before I could clear the Neutral Zone. It was something I’d heard her say countless times growing up, and usually it made me want to roll my eyes at her. But this time, her words filled me with a genuine sense of dread.
“I know the future is scary at times, sweetheart. But there’s just no escaping it.”
I locked the door and pressed my back to it, and with my mother’s warning about the inescapable nature of the future still echoing in my ears, I scanned the interior of my room, for the first time feeling a sense of shame over how I’d chosen to decorate it. The posters on my walls, the books and comics and toys on my shelves—nearly all of them had once belonged to my late father. The room couldn’t even be classified as a shrine to his memory, because I didn’t even remember the guy. This was more a museum exhibit—a really sad, fucked-up one, devoted to a man I’d never even known, and never would.
No wonder my mother avoided coming in here. Seeing the décor probably broke her heart two or three different ways.
A small fleet of model spacecraft hung suspended from the ceiling on fishing line, and as I crossed my room, I brushed each of them with my fingertips, setting them in motion one after the other. First the starship Enterprise, then the Sulaco from Aliens, followed by an X-Wing, a Y-Wing, the Millennium Falcon, a Veritech Fighter from Robotech—and finally, a carefully painted Gunstar from The Last Starfighter.
I pulled the window shades down, plunging the room into darkness save for a narrow shaft of sunlight that fell on my battered leather gaming chair in the corner, casting it in an otherworldly glow. As I collapsed into the chair, I sang the first five bars of “Duel of the Fates” to myself in anticipation: Dunt-dunt-dah-dah-dah!
I grabbed my dusty game console and disconnected my old plastic flight stick and throttle controllers, along with my bulky first-generation VR headset, which was held together with copious amounts of black electrical tape. Once the old gear was set aside, I connected the various components of my new Interceptor Flight Control System and positioned them around my chair, placing the heavy metal flight stick on an old milk crate in front of me, directly between my knees, with the separate throttle controller on the flat armrest of my chair, within easy reach of my left hand.
This setup was supposed to re-create the exact layout of the Interceptor cockpit controls seen in the game. My own private starship simulator. Sitting there inside it, I remembered building a spaceship cockpit out of couch pillows in front of the television when I was a kid, in an effort to make the experience of playing Star Fox on my Nintendo 64 more realistic. I’d had the idea after seeing some kids do it in an old Atari commercial for Cosmic Ark on one of my father’s old videotapes.
Once I had my new controllers arranged properly, I synced my phone to the Bluetooth headphones built into my new Armada VR flight helmet. Then I cued up my Raid the Arcade playlist—my digital re-creation of an old analog mixtape I’d found among my father’s things with that title carefully printed on its label in my father’s handwriting. The title led me to assume it was a compilation of his favorite gaming music, and I’d grown up listening to those songs while I played videogames, too. As a result, listening to my father’s old digital combat compilation had become an essential part of my Armada gaming ritual. Trying to play without my Raid the Arcade playlist on in the background invariably threw off my aim and my rhythm. That’s why I made sure I had it cued up before the start of every mission.
I put on the faux Interceptor pilot helmet and adjusted its built-in noise-canceling headphones, which completely covered each of my ears. After I adjusted the VR goggles to make sure they fit snugly over my eyes, I thumbed the small button that extended the helmet’s retractable microphone—a completely pointless, yet undeniably cool feature. Then I retracted and extended the microphone a few more times, just to hear the sound it made.