As the mighty alien fleet from the very latest computer game thunders across the computer screen, Johnny Maxwell prepares to blow them into the usual million pieces.
And they send him a message:
We Surrender.
They're not supposed to do that! But they've done it. They don't want to die. They just want to go home.
Johnny is the only human who knows. So he has to learn how to wage all-out Peace, and they don't make joysticks with a "Don't Fire" button...
It's hard, trying to Save Mankind from the Galactic Hordes. It's even harder trying to save the Galactic Hordes from Mankind. But it's only a game, isn't it?
Isn't it?
If Not You, Who Else?
-- Back cover blurb
* * *
Johnny fired the laser one more time. Swsssh. He didn't really know why. It was just because you had the joystick and there was the Fire button and that was what it was for.
After all, there wasn't a Don't Fire button.
* * *
Wobbler was the kind of boy who's always picked last when you had to pick teams, although that was all right at the moment as the PE teacher didn't believe in teams because they encouraged competition.
* * *
But [Wobbler] was good at games. They just weren't the ones that people thought you ought to be good at. If ever there was an Inter-Schools First-One-To-Break-The-Unbreakable-Copy-Protection-on-Galactic-Thrusters, Wobbler wouldn't just be in the team, he'd be picking the team.
* * *
"Yo, wobbler," said Johnny.
"It's not cool to say Yo any more," said Wobbler.
"Is it rad to say cool?" said Johnny.
"Cool's always cool. And no-one says rad any more, either."
* * *
Wobbler only played games once, Wobbler could watch a game for a couple of minutes, and then pick up the joystick and get top score. And then never play it again.
* * *
Wobbler had discs full of computer viruses. He didn't do anything with them. He just collected them, like stamps or something.
* * *
[Johnny] never had the heart to tell Wobbler that he didn't play half the games Wobbler passed on. You couldn't. Not if you wanted time to sleep and eat meals. But that was all right because Wobbler never asked. As far as Wobbler was concerned, computer games weren't there for playing. They were for breaking into, rewriting so that you got extra lives or whatever, and then copying and giving away to everyone.
* * *
Basically, there were two sides to the world. There was the entire computer games software industry engaged in a tremendous effort to stamp out piracy, and there was Wobbler. Currently, Wobbler was in front.
* * *
The ScreeWee had turned up out of nowhere and bombed some planets with humans on them. Nearly all the starships had been blown up. So there was only this one left, the experimental one. It was all that stood against the ScreeWee hordes. And only you ... that is to say John Maxwell, aged twelve, in between the time you get home from school and get something to eat and do your homework ... can save mankind.
* * *
Johnny typed: I shoot at you and you shoto at me. That is the game.
But we die.
Johnny typed: Sometimes I die. I die a lot.
But YOU live again.
* * *
You never said to your parents, "Hey, I really need a computer because that way I can play Megasteroids."
No, you said, "I really need a computer because of school."
It's educational.
* * *
If you kept your head down, they were generally so grateful that you were not, e.g., causing policemen to come to the school, or actually nailing a teacher to anything, that you got left alone.
* * *
"We must fight on!"
"And then we die," said the Captain. "We fight, and then we die. That's how it goes."
"Then we die gloriously!"
"There's an important word in that sentence," said the Captain. "And it's not the word 'gloriously.'"
* * *
"Where are we going?"
"Earth."
"Earth? Hang on! That's where I live! People can get into serious trouble showing huge alien fleets where they live!"
* * *
It's not listening to me, he thought. You don't listen to the enemy. The enemy's there to be shot at. That's why it's the enemy. That's what the enemy's for.
* * *
Yo-less listened to everything carefully. It worried teachers, the way he listened carefully to everything they said. They always suspected he was trying to catch them out.
* * *
It was Games in the afternoon. Bigmac was the only one who played. He'd never been keen until they introduced hockey. You got a club to hit people, he said.
* * *
Wobbler had written an actual computer game like this once. It was called Journey to Alpha Centauri. It was a screen with some dots on it. Because, he said, it happened in real time, which no-one had ever heard of until computers. He'd seen on TV that it took three thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. He had written it so that if anyone kept their computer on for three thousand years, they'd be rewarded by a little dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and then a message saying, "Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home."
* * *
No-one would bother to put plastic aliens inside the plastic cereal if they were just, you know, doing everyday things. Holding the Cosmiczippo Ray(tm) hedge clippers! Getting on the Megadeath(tm) bus! Hanging out at the Star Thruster Mall!
* * *
"I want to go into J&J Software," said Wobbler. "They might have got Cosmic Coffee Mats in. It got a review in Bazzammm! and they said it's got an unbreakable copy protection."
"Did they say it was any good?" said Bigmac.
"Who cares?"
* * *
Johnny: "Only you can save mankind."
Bigmac: "What?"
Wobbler: "It's the game."
Johnny: "But it always says something like that on the boxes you get games in."
Bigmac: "Well. Yeah. Something like that. Why not?"
Johnny: "I mean they never say, 'Only You are going to be put inside a Billion Pounds Worth of Machine with more Switches that you've Ever Seen and be Blown to Bits by a Thousand Skilled Enemy Pilots because You Don't Really Know how to Fly It.'"
* * *
"Can't see them ever selling a game called Get Shot to Pieces."
* * *
Wobbler thought that California was where good people went when they died.
* * *
A girl was complaining to Mr. Patel about a game she'd bought. Everyone knew you couldn't do that, even if you'd opened the box and it was full of nothing but mouse droppings. Mr. Patel took the view that once the transparent wrapper had come off, even the Pope wouldn't be allowed to return a game, not even if he got God to come in as well.
* * *
The shop watched in amazement. There was a new game in his hand. He was actually going to make an exchange. This was like Genghis Khan deciding not to attack a city but stay at home and watch the football instead.
* * *
Every spy film and every adventure had a chase through the native market-place, with lots of humorous rickshaws crashing into stalls and tables being knocked over and chickens squawking, and the theory was: it was the same market-place every time. It always looked the same. There was probably a stallholder somewhere who was getting very fed up with it...
* * *
[The aliens] never did this in the game. They had much more firepower than you, but they used it stupidly. It had to be like that. You could only win against hundreds of alien ships if they had the same grasp of gunnery techniques as the common cucumber.
* * *
"You shoot at us as well!"
"Self-defence."
"No! Often you shoot first!"
"With humans, we have often found it essential to get our self-defence in assoon as possible."
* * *
Every man in the country had to do army training and keep a gun at home, [the encyclopedia] said. But Switzerland never fought anyone. Perhaps that made sense somewhere. And what the country used to be known for was designing intricate and ingenious mechanical masterpieces that made a little wooden bird come out and go cuckoo.
* * *
The Captain pointed out window. The fleet was passing several more ships of the ancient Space Invader race.
"They fought," she said. "Endlessly. And look at them now. And they were only the first. Remember what happened to the Vortiroids? And the Meggazzoids? And the Glaxoticon? Do you want to be like them?"
"Hah. They were primitive. Very low resolution."
* * *
That was the point of space. It was just infinity, huge and black with one dot on it that was everything else.
* * *
No-one could sit in that chair. It was full of old T-shirts and books and supper plates and junk. There was a deep sock layer and possibly the Lost Strawberry Yoghurt. No-one could sit down there without special equipment.
* * *
"You humans are strange," she said. "You are warlike. But you make rules. Rules of war!"
"Um, I think we don't always obey all those rules," said Johnny.
Another four-armed shrug.
"Does that matter? Even to have made such rules ... You think all of life is a game."
* * *
"Are you saying that I've got to go down to the shops and get takeaway Jumboburgers for an entire alien spacefleet?"
"Not exactly."
"I should think not--"
"My Chief Engineer wants a Bucket of Chicken Lumps."
* * *
"What do ScreeWee usually eat?"
"Normally we eat a kind of waterweed. It contains a perfect balance of vitamins, minerals, and trace elements to ensure a healthy growth of scale and crest."
"Then why--"
"But, as you would put it, it tastes like poo."
* * *
"Remember," she said, "only you can save mankind."
"And I said I already--"
"ScreeWee is the human name for us," said the Captain. "Have you ever wondered what the ScreeWee name for ScreeWee name is?"
* * *
"Anyway ... so how do we get back?"
"I don't know," said Johnny. "I generally do it by dying."
"Is there some other way?" said Yo-less, after a long, thoughtful pause.
* * *
"It just means you should treat people as people and, you know ... not just assume girls can't do stuff. We got a talk about it at school. There's lots of stuff most girls can't do, but you've got to pretend they can, so that more of them will."
-- Sexism explained
* * *
People talked about the Joshua N'Clement block in the same way they probably once talked about the Black Hole of Calcutta or the Spanish Inquisition's reception area.
* * *
Bigmac's brother was reliably believed to be in the job of moving video recorders around in an informal way.
* * *
He microwaved himself something called a Pour-On Genuine Creole Lasagne, which said it served four portions. It did if you were dwarfs.
* * *
The lasagne looked real. It looked as though someone had already eaten it once.
* * *
"The humans will find us. And then they will--"
"Die," said the Gunnery Officer. "And we shall win. The others were stupid. We are not. We can win. We shall give the humans the mother of all battles."
"Ah, yes," said the Captain. "Mother and grandmother of battles. Battles that breed more battles."
* * *
It hadn't been a friendly face. The voice had sounded as though it had learned Human out of a book, just like the real Captain. But in this case it had been a nasty book. It also sounded as though it belonged to someone who would count to sixty like this: "One, two, three, four, five, seven, eighteen, thirty-five, forty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty -- firing, ready or not--"
* * *
"Don't fire, first. Promise? I hate dying. It makes it hard to think."
* * *
"No, I'm the one who kind of hangs around and no-one notices much," said Johnny desperately.
"Who? I didn't see anyone."
"Right! That was me!"
* * *
"How can you be the good guys if you're dropping bombs right down people's chimneys? And blowing people up just because they're being bossed around by a looney?"
* * *
"Shamans used to be these kinds of people who lived partly in a dream world and partly in the real world," said Wobbler. "Like medicine men and druids and guys like that. They used to be very important. They used to guide people."
"Guide?" said Johnny. "Where to?"
"Not sure. Anyway, my mother says they were creations of Satan."
"Yes, but your mother says that about practically everything," said Wobbler.
"That is true," said Yo-less gravely. "That's her hobby."
* * *
"She said role-playing games were creations of Satan," said Wobbler.
"True."
"Dead clever of him," said Wobbler. "I mean, sitting down there in Hell, working out all the combat tables and everything. I bet he used to really swear every time the dice caught fire..."
* * *
On Earth, No-one Can Hear You Say "Um"
* * *
"I've got to talk to you. I mean face to face."
"How do I know you're not some sort of maniac?"
"Do I sound like some sort of maniac?"
"Yes!"
"All right, but apart from that?"
* * *
"Of course I take it seriously. It's a game. You've got to win them, otherwise what's the point?"
* * *
Johnny: "...I'm not killing anyone."
Kirsty: "Then you can't win."
Johnny: "I don't want to win. I just don't want them to lose."
* * *
She'd always gone through life as if there was a big red arrow above the planet, indicating precisely where she was.
* * *
"Stuck? You're an alien," said Johnny. "Aliens don't get stuck in air ducts. It's practically a well-known fact."
* * *
"I saw a film where there was an alien crawling around inside a spaceship's air ducts and it could come out wherever it liked," said Johnny reproachfully.
"Doubtless it had a map," said the Captain.
* * *
"We have a proverb," said the Captain. "SkeejeeshejweeJEEyee. It means..." She thought for a moment. "When you are riding a jee, a six-legged domesticated beast of burden capable of simple instruction but also traditionally foul-tempered, it is easier to stay on rather than dismount; equally, better to trust yourself to a jee than risk attack from the sure-footed JEEyee, which will easily outrun a ScreeWee on foot. Of course, it is a little snappier in our language."
* * *
"Well, I'm here now," she said. "And ready to kick some butt."
"Some but what?" said Johnny wearily. He really hated the phrase. It was a game saying. It tried to fool you into believing that real bullets weren't going to go through real people.
* * *
"Why do you just accept everything? Why don't you ever try to change things?"
"They're generally bad enough already."
* * *
"I keep telling you! You have to give them a chance to surrender!"
"You always make it difficult!"
* * *
"Go ahead," said Kirsty. "Make my stardate."
* * *
Shoot them in space, shoot them on a screen, and there was just an explosion and five points on the score total. When they'd been shot from a few metres away, then there was simply a reminder that someone who had been alive was now, very definitely, not alive any more. And would never be again.
* * *
...Wobbler had a vision: One day, if he could master GCSE maths and reliably pick up a soldering iron by the end that wasn't hot, he was going to be a Big Man in computers.
* * *
One day, the world would hear from Wobbler Johnson -- probably via a phone-line it didn't know was connected to its computer.
* * *
"No-one tells me to shut up!"
"I'm telling you now. Just because you've got a mind like a, a hammer doesn't mean you have to treat everyone else like a nail."
* * *
"Johnny?"
"Yes, Captain."
"Thank you. You did not have to help us."
"If not me, then who else?"
* * *
"What did you mean ... you know, back there? When you said I see aliens everywhere?"
"Um. Can't remember."
"You must have meant something."
"I'm not even sure there are aliens. Only different kinds of us. But I know what the important thing is. The important thing is to be exactly sure about what you're doing. The important thing is to remember it's not a game. None of it. Even the games."
* * *
These were still Trying Times. There was still school. Nothing actually was better, probably. No-one was doing anything with a magic wand.
But the fleet had got away. Compared to that, everything else was ... well, not easy. But less like a wall and more like steps.
You might never win, but at least you could try. If not you, who else?