Free Armada by Ernest Cline Page B

fingertips, setting them in motion one after the other. First the starship Enterprise, then the Sulaco from Aliens, followed by an X-Wing, a Y-Wing, the Millennium Falcon, a Veritech Fighter from Robotech—and finally, a carefully painted Gunstar from The Last Starfighter .
    I pulled the window shades down, plunging the room into darkness save for a narrow shaft of sunlight that fell on my battered leather gaming chair in the corner, casting it in an otherworldly glow. As I collapsed into the chair, I sang the first five bars of “Duel of the Fates” to myself in anticipation: Dunt-dunt-dah-dah-dah!
    I grabbed my dusty game console and disconnected my old plastic flight stick and throttle controllers, along with my bulky first-generation VR headset, which was held together with copious amounts of black electrical tape. Once the old gear was set aside, I connected the various components of my new Interceptor Flight Control System and positioned them around my chair, placing the heavy metal flight stick on an old milk crate in front of me, directly between my knees, with the separate throttle controller on the flat armrest of my chair, within easy reach of my left hand.
    This setup was supposed to re-create the exact layout of the Interceptor cockpit controls seen in the game. My own private starship simulator. Sitting there inside it, I remembered building a spaceship cockpit out of couch pillows in front of the television when I was a kid, in an effort to make the experience of playing Star Fox on my Nintendo 64 more realistic. I’d had the idea after seeing some kids do it in an old Atari commercial for Cosmic Ark on one of my father’s old videotapes.
    Once I had my new controllers arranged properly, I synced my phone to the Bluetooth headphones built into my new Armada VR flight helmet. Then I cued up my Raid the Arcade playlist—my digital re-creation of an old analog mixtape I’d found among my father’s things with that title carefully printed on its label in my father’s handwriting. The title led me to assume it was a compilation of his favorite gaming music, and I’d grown up listening to those songs while I played videogames, too. As a result, listening to my father’s old digital combat compilation had become an essential part of my Armada gaming ritual. Trying to play without my Raid the Arcade playlist on in the background invariably threw off my aim and my rhythm. That’s why I made sure I had it cued up before the start of every mission.
    I put on the faux Interceptor pilot helmet and adjusted its built-in noise-canceling headphones, which completely covered each of my ears. After I adjusted the VR goggles to make sure they fit snugly over my eyes, I thumbed the small button that extended the helmet’s retractable microphone—a completely pointless, yet undeniably cool feature. Then I retracted and extended the microphone a few more times, just to hear the sound it made.
    Once the game finished loading, I spent a few minutes customizing the button configuration on my new throttle and flight-stick controllers, then logged on to the Armada multiplayer server.
    I immediately checked the EDA pilot rankings, to make sure my ranking hadn’t slipped since my last login. But my so-cheesy-it-was-cool call sign was still there, in sixth place. I’d held that spot for over two months now, but a part of me was always still shocked to see it there, listed among the top ten, alongside the game’s most famous—and infamous—players. I scanned the familiar collection of call signs, listed in what had now become a familiar order:
    01. RedJive
    02. MaxJenius
    03. Withnailed
    04. Viper
    05. Rostam
    06. IronBeagle
    07. Whoadie
    08. CrazyJi
    09. AtomicMom
    10. Kushmaster5000
    I had been seeing these ten call signs almost every night for years, but I didn’t actually know who any of those people really were—or where they lived, either. Aside from a