Read Online Armada by Ernest Cline - Free Book Online

microtransactions to milk players for extra revenue, either.
    I closed the window and stared at the icons on the desktop, trying to sort out my thoughts. Until today, it had never occurred to me to make a connection between the alien invasion plotline of Chaos Terrain’s games and the conspiracy theory outlined in my father’s notebook. There were hundreds of alien-invasion-themed movies, shows, books, and videogames released every year, and Armada was just one of them. Besides, the game had only been out for a few years, so how could it possibly be connected to the stuff my father had written in his notebook decades ago?
    On the other hand, if the government really did want to train average citizens to operate drones in combat, then multiplayer combat games like Armada and Terra Firma would be exactly the sort of the games you’d create to do it. …
    When the Star Trek door chime sounded a few minutes later and a gaggle of semi-regulars from the nearby junior high filed into the store, I shoved my new helmet, throttle, and flight-stick controllers back into their box and stowed it under the counter before any of the prepubescent hooligans could lay their covetous eyes upon it.
    â€œWelcome to Starbase Ace, where the game is never over,” I said, reciting the store’s canned greeting with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. “How may I help you young gentlemen this evening?”

W hen I got back home, my mother’s car was parked in the driveway. This was a pleasant surprise, because she’d had to work a lot of overtime at the hospital this past year, and a lot of nights she didn’t get home until after I’d already crashed for the night.
    But knowing she was home also put me on edge, because she’d always been able to tell when something was bothering me. When I was younger, I was convinced she possessed some sort of mutant maternal telepathy that allowed her to read my mind, especially when there was crazy shit going on inside it.
    I found my mother stretched out on the living-room sofa, with Muffit curled up at her feet, watching the latest episode of Doctor Who, one of her many televised addictions. Neither of them heard me come in, so I just stood there for a moment, watching my mother watch her show.
    Pamela Lightman (née Crandall) was the coolest woman I’d ever met, as well as the toughest. She reminded me a lot of Sarah Connor or Ellen Ripley—sure, she might have a few issues, but she was also the kind of single mom who would strap on heavy artillery and mow down killer cyborgs, if that was what it took to protect her offspring.
    My mother was also ridiculously beautiful. I know people are supposed to say things like that about their mothers, but in my case it happened to be a fact. Few young men know the Oedipal torment of growing up with an insanely hot, perpetually single mom. Watching men constantly flip out over her looks before they’d even bothered to get to know her had made me faintly disgusted by my own gender—as if I didn’t already have enough psychological baggage strapped to my luggage rack.
    Raising me all by herself had been difficult for my mother, in lots of ways that probably weren’t obvious to most people. For one thing, she’d done it without any assistance from her own parents. She’d lost her own father to cancer when she was still in grade school, and then her ultra-religious mother had disowned her for getting knocked up while she was still a senior in high school and then marrying the no-good Nintendo nerd who’d defiled her.
    My mom had told me that her mother only tried to reconcile with her once, a few months after my father died. It didn’t go well. She’d made the mistake of telling my mom his death was “a blessing in disguise” because it meant that now she could find herself a “respectable husband—one with some prospects.”
    After that, my mom had disowned