Armada: A Novel

The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games.

—Eugene Jarvis, creator of Defender

“You put me at the controls of a giant battle mech, I will crush my enemies and see them driven before me.”
I grinned. “What about the lamentations of their women?”
“Oh yeah,” she said, chuckling. “Their women lamentate all over the place. That goes without saying, doesn’t it?”

I’d grown up believing that despite our aspirations, humans were still just a bunch of bipedal apes, divided into arbitrary tribes that were constantly at war over their ruined planet’s dwindling natural resources. I’d always assumed that our future would end up looking more like Mad Max than Star Trek. But now I was forced to see our rampant fossil fuel consumption—and our seeming disregard for its effect on our already-changing climate—in an entirely new light. We hadn’t used up all of our oil and ravaged our planet in a mindless pursuit of consumerism, but in preparation for a dark day that most of us hadn’t even known was coming.

“They put you in charge of defending us? Now I know we’re doomed!”

It’s finally happening, Zack. The Call to Adventure you’ve been waiting for your whole life. It’s standing right in front of you.
And I was scared shitless.

“They’re about to tell us the world is ending, you realize?” she said. “You don’t want to be stone-cold sober for that shit, do you?”

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.

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.