Free Armada by Ernest Cline

asked, eying me.
    â€œYou mean, did I decide what I want to do with the rest of my life?”
    She nodded. I took a deep breath and said the first thing that came to mind.
    â€œWell, I have thought about this quite a bit, and after careful consideration, I’ve decided that I don’t want to buy anything, sell anything, or process anything.”
    She frowned and began to shake her head in protest, but I kept going.
    â€œYou know, as a career, I don’t want to do that,” I went on. “I don’t want to buy anything sold or processed, I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed—”
    â€œâ€”or process anything sold, bought, or processed,” she finished, cutting me off. “Who do you think you’re messing with? Lloyd, Lloyd, all-null-and-void?”
    â€œBusted,” I said, raising my hands in a gesture of guilt. “That’s what you get for making me watch that flick seven gajillion times.”
    She folded her arms.
    â€œZack, there’s more than enough money set aside in your college fund to cover four years of tuition at most schools. You can go anywhere you want—and study anything you want. Do you know how lucky you are?”
    Yep. I was lucky, all right. My mom had started that college fund for me when I was still just a baby, using some of the settlement money from my father’s death that was left over after she bought our house. There had been enough to cover her tuition for nursing school, too.
    Lucky, right?
    Want to hear another stroke of great luck? My father’s corpse was so badly burned in the explosion that the coroner had to use his dental records to identify the body, saving my mom from having to go to the morgue and identify his corpse herself.
    How much good fortune can one family stand?
    â€œDid you think over what we discussed last time?” she asked. “You promised to consider going to college to study how to make videogames, like Mike Cruz is planning to do?”
    â€œI’m good at playing videogames, Mom,” I said. “Not at making them. You need to be really good at programming or digital art, and I suck at both.” I sighed and looked at my feet.
    â€œThe important thing is that you love gaming,” she said. “You’d figure out the rest. You’d enjoy it.” She smiled and touched my face. “You know I’m right. You’ve got gamer geek DNA on both sides.”
    It was true. You’d never know it to look at her, but my mom was a hardcore gamer in her day, too. She’d had a serious World of Warcraft habit for a few years. She was more of a casual gamer now, but she played Terra Firma missions with me sometimes.
    â€œAren’t there people who get paid to play the videogames to test them out?”
    â€œYeah, they’re called quality-assurance testers,” I said. “The job sounds good in theory, but in reality it sucks. The pay is crap, and all you do is play the same level of the same game over and over thousands of times to try and find bugs in the code. That would drive me nuts.”
    She sighed and nodded. “Yeah, me too.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, then smiled. “You know, Zack,” she said, “you can enroll in college even if you’re still not sure what you want to study. You just take a bunch of different courses and see what interests you. You’ll figure out what you want to do eventually.”
    I smiled and nodded in agreement. But she still didn’t budge.
    â€œI’m not trying to pressure you, honey,” she said. “I just want to have a plan.”
    â€œMy plan for right now,” I slowly told my mother, “is to keep on working at Starbase Ace. Maybe switch from part-time to full-time—”
    â€œThat’s an after-school job, Zack, not a long-term career plan. Think about what it would be like five years from now. Everyone else will be finishing