His early letters filled in missing details of the story I’d already pieced together from reading his old Theory notebook. My father described in detail how he’d begun to uncover facets of the EDA’s grand conspiracy in the years before they recruited him, after his encounter with the strange Pha?ton game at his local arcade. He would later learn that the same prototype was used to recruit Shin, Graham, and Admiral Vance.
After he was inducted, my father’s longtime suspicions were confirmed—the EDA had been tracking him ever since he was in grade school. He’d been moved to the top of their watch list after he’d mailed in dozens of fuzzy Polaroids of his record high scores to Activision. But the EDA deemed him ineligible for early recruitment, due to some “troubling results” in the preliminary psych evaluation they did on him. That was why they didn’t actually recruit my father until much later, when he was nineteen—shortly after he became a father. One morning, two men in black suits showed up during his lunch break and abducted him from his job. They took him to one of their secret installations and showed him an earlier version of the EDA briefing film I’d been shown and gave him a choice—he could either join the EDA and use his videogame skills to try to help save humanity, or, he could, as he said, “puss out and keep wading through sewage for a living, until aliens show up and destroy our planet, along with my wife, my baby boy, and everyone else I know and love.”
What choice did I have, Zack? I didn’t want to leave you two, but I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing while that happened. So I said yes, even though I knew it meant I might never see you and your mother again. If I died protecting the two of you and our home, then I figured it would be worth it.
Imprisonment. That was what he began to call it.
In every letter I opened, my father repeated the same apologies, marking and lamenting every single missed birthday or Christmas. For him, every milestone of my childhood and adolescence had been a double-edge sword. Watching me grow to manhood brought him joy, even from such a great distance. But that joy was always tinged with the bitter agony he felt at having missed every last second of it, and the knowledge of the pain caused by his absence.
Once a month, he wrote, the EDA would send him updates about my mother and me. He looked forward to them like holidays. In the interim, he scoured the Internet for any additional scrap of news about us he could find in a local paper or on my school’s website. Every time he received a new photo of me, he wrote about it in his letters in endless detail, going on and on about how big I was getting. About how much he’d missed me and my mom, more and more every year.
He wrote to me about his day-to-day life as an elite Moon Base Alpha drone pilot. He recounted the details of the battles he fought each year, during the Jovian Opposition. He wrote about his hopes for victory, and about his fear of “the coming war.” My father used that phrase often in his letters. “The coming war.” It made me realize how terrible it must have been for him, to have this conflict hanging over his head all these years. My father had lived his whole adult life with this terrible burden, knowing that the End of Everything was coming, and that it was drawing closer every second.
In one letter, he confessed that he’d stopped dreading the coming invasion. “Now I long for it begin,” he wrote. “Because, one way or another, it will put an end to my misery—and my imprisonment here.”
He wrote: “I miss you and your mother so much I can barely stand it sometimes.”
And then, half a dozen letters later, he wrote, “I just can’t stand it anymore.”
Another letter said he’d gone “a little nuts for a while.” He wrote about how they put him on antidepressants. When things got really bad, he took tranquilizers sometimes, too. And he was required to videoconference with a shrink back on Earth twice a week.
He wrote that they kept giving him medals, but they no longer meant anything to him. He just wanted to go home. But he couldn’t, because it was his job to make sure humanity still had a home when this was all over. Besides, he knew the EDA wouldn’t let him go home now, anyway, because he’d asked them—repeatedly. But they told him he was far too valuable an asset, and that the world needed him right where he was. So instead, he’d started to beg the EDA to give him just a few hours of shore leave, so he could visit his family and remember what it was he was up here fighting for. They told him that would be too big of a security risk, and that if anyone learned he was still alive, especially his family, it could jeopardize everything he had worked for and sacrificed for all of these years.