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I reminded myself that I was a man of science, even if I did usually get a C in it.
We were all probably stuck here for the duration, on the third rock from our sun. Boldly going extinct.
But the truth was, I did miss him. And I’d attempted to fill the void created by his absence with data, by absorbing every scrap of information about him that I could. Sometimes, it felt like I was trying to earn the right to miss him with the same intensity my mom and his parents had always seemed to.
Wax on, wax off—but on a global scale!
STARSHIP CAPTAINS DO IT ON IMPULSE.
Kewl!
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 games you’d create to do it….
“That’s how you know you’ve mastered a videogame—when a bunch of butt-hurt crybabies start to accuse you of cheating in an effort to cope with the beatdown they’ve just suffered at your hands.”
Like a well-matched crystal on a pcb.
But their size was dwarfed by the epic scope of their stupidity.
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. Even humanity’s lack of concern for its rampant overpopulation problem now made a terrible kind of sense. What difference did it make if our planet was capable of supporting all seven billion of us in the long term when a far greater threat to our numbers was
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“We all ran outside to the parking lot. Then two people wearing suits—a man and a woman—stepped out of the shuttle and asked for me by my full name, which was weirdly humiliating, like getting called to the principal’s office or something. They said they needed my ‘assistance with a matter of urgent national security.’ What was I supposed to do? They were riding around in a spaceship from a videogame, and I knew I couldn’t spend the rest of my life wondering what it looked like on the inside, or where it was going to take me—so I went with them.”
Then they showed us the most disturbing government training film in history.
“My parents called me Whoadie ever since I was a baby. I didn’t always like it, because there were some boys at school used to call me Whoadie the Toadie all the time. But then I punched their fucking lights out and they stopped.”
When I finally stepped outside, he was right there, waiting for me.
“Right, we wouldn’t want the Cigarette Smoking Man to eavesdrop on us,”
“If they wanted to exterminate humanity, they could have done it decades ago,” he said. “They had the technological capability to wipe us out the day we made first contact with them. The illusion that we can defeat them in this war is just that—an illusion. It always has been.”
“Take his call sign, Viper. He borrowed that from Tom Skerritt’s character in Top Gun, his all-time favorite movie. He hates science fiction. I could never get him to watch Trek, Wars, Firefly, or BSG!” He shook his head. “The bastard even refused to watch E.T.! Who doesn’t love E.T., I ask you?” “Yeah, the man obviously can’t be trusted,” I muttered.
“We are coming here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and we have no more bubblegum!”
You had to be both psychic and suicidal to get the timing right, and at that moment, I was neither. My father, however, appeared to be both.
Stormtrooper Syndrome, I thought to myself absurdly. These guys couldn’t hit water if they fell out of a fucking boat.
