“Good luck, pilots. Everyone down here on Earth is counting on you.”
He snapped us a farewell salute, and his image winked out on the view screen, once again replaced by the Earth Defense Alliance crest.
Then, while the mission loaded, we were all treated to a familiar cut scene showing our squadron of heroic-looking, slightly out-of-focus EDA pilots sprinting out the briefing room’s exit, down a brightly lit access corridor, and on into the Moon Base Alpha Drone Operations Control Center, a large circular room with dozens of oval hatchways embedded in the floor, spaced only a few meters apart—each containing a drone controller pod. Their hatches hissed open, revealing simulated Interceptor cockpits—each one a pilot seat surrounded by an array of controls and readouts, along with a wraparound view screen shaped like a cockpit canopy window.
The cut scene ended, and my perspective shifted back to my avatar’s POV—only now I was sitting inside my own drone controller pod.
A second later, the hatch hissed closed above me just as all of the control panels around me lit up, as did the wraparound view screen. This created a second layer of simulation—the illusion that I was now sitting inside an ADI-88 Aerospace Drone Interceptor, powered up and waiting in its coiled launch rack in the Doolittle’s drone hangar.
I reached out to blindly place my hands on the new controllers in front of me, adjusting their placement to match the layout of my virtual cockpit inside the game. Then I took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, trying to relax. This was usually the best part of my day, when I got to escape my suburban existence for a few hours and become a crack fighter pilot duking it out with evil alien invaders. It was supposed to be cathartic.
But tonight, I didn’t feel like I was escaping anything. I felt anxious. Excited. Righteous. Maybe even a little bloodthirsty.
Like I was going to war.
The goggles inside my new Armada VR helmet provided me with an immersive 360-degree view from inside my drone’s simulated cockpit. Looking out through its wraparound canopy, I could see the Doolittle’s drone launch hangar. I glanced left and then right, taking in the row of identical Interceptors lined up on either side of me, gleaming under the hangar dome’s floodlights, ready for launch.
My heads-up display appeared, superimposed over my wraparound view out of the cockpit, providing readouts of my starship’s flight, weapon, and communication systems, along with radar, sensor, and navigation data.
I cleared my throat and addressed AVA, my ship’s artificially intelligent voice-activated avionics computer. AVA served as a virtual copilot, managing my ship’s navigation, weapons, and communication systems and providing me with verbal status updates. AVA could also give novice pilots helpful on-the-fly recommendations on how to improve their maneuvering techniques and weapon usage, but I’d disabled that feature long ago.
“AVA, prepare all systems for launch,” I said.
“Compliance!” AVA chirped brightly. At the default setting, the computer spoke in a perpetually calm, synthesized female voice that I found unnerving in the heat of battle. So I’d installed several other custom sound profiles, including one called Trimaxion, which gave it the voice of the ship’s computer in Flight of the Navigator. It made my ship’s voice sound like Pee-wee Herman yelling through a vocoder, but this amused me and kept me on my toes.
Each Interceptor’s thrusters, weapons, and shields were powered by a fusion reactor that constantly recharged its drone’s power cells. But it did so at a very slow rate, so you needed to use your power sparingly during battle—otherwise you’d end up floating through space, a sitting duck with a dead stick.
It was easy to run out of juice during the heat of combat, because every time you moved or fired your weapons it used up some of your power, and whenever your shields took a direct hit, that drained your power cells, too. When they started to get too low, your drone would lose its shields first, then its weapons, and finally its thrusters. Then your drone would crash and burn—or, if you were lucky enough to be fighting in space, it would just begin to drift helplessly through the void while you waited for the power cells to recharge enough for your thrusters to come back online, praying that an enemy ship didn’t pick you off first—which it almost always did.