In Armada by Ernest Cline, Zack Lightman is a senior in high school who is addicted to video games-specifically Armada-an MMO (massive multiplayer online-I had to look that up!) about aliens invading earth. When the story opens, Zack is ranked number six in the world for this particular game.
I've never played video games, but I can see the attraction. The characters feel as though they are engaged in an actual battle with all of the accompanying adrenaline rush but without the actual physical danger. For Zack though, it all becomes very real the day he looks out the window at school and sees a space ship that is an exact replica of one of the alien ships in the game he plays. He does not call attention to is because he is afraid no one else will see it. People already believe he is a psychopath because of something that happened when he was in junior high. He fears that he is having a psychotic break-just like he believes his deceased father had many years ago. His father, also a gamer, left behind journals that detailed his belief that the government was using video games and movies to prepare citizens for an imminent alien invasion.
Zack read his father's journals as a ten-year-old, and he goes back to them after he sees the ship. As he reads he realizes that perhaps he had been wrong; he understands the "hint of a method behind his seeming madness" (27). I think that this realization is going to cause Zack to delve more deeply into his father's writing, and I think he's going to discover that his father was not crazy, and he may even find out that he's not really dead.
I also think that there is something up with Ray, Zack's boss at the video game store. Every time Zack goes to work, Ray coerced [him] into playing video games rather than actually working. He insists that, in addition to Armada, Zack also play another game created by the same company. I'm pretty sure that this foreshadows Ray not being exactly who he says he is.
At work one day Zack has a sudden realization when it strikes him that "it had never occurred to [him] to make a connection between the alien invasion plotline of Chaos Terrain's games and the conspiracy theory outlined in [his] father's notebook" (46). This solidifies my belief that Zack is not crazy-and neither was his father. I am more convinced than ever that Zack's dad may be alive somewhere, and there has been a huge government coverup.
I'll continue to write about this one, but if my predictions based on these signposts are correct, I won't tell you. No spoilers here; you'll have to read it yourself!
