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WHY?”
    Aside from his fictional Polybius and Phaëton drawings, he never gave much in the way of evidence. Just his own wild theories.
    â€œThe military—or some shadow organization within the military—is tracking and profiling all of the world’s highest-scoring videogamers, using a variety of methods.” Then he detailed one example—Activision’s high-score patches.
    Back in the ’80s, the game company Activision had run a popular promotion in which players who mailed in proof of a high score—in the form of a Polaroid of the high score on their TV screen—received cool embroidered patches as a reward. My father believed Activision’s patch promotion had actually been an elaborate ruse designed to obtain the names and addresses of the world’s highest-scoring gamers.
    At the end of the entry, using a different-colored pen, my father had added: “Much easier to track elite gamers now via the Internet! Was this one of the reasons it was created?”
    Of course, my father never actually got around to specifying exactly what he believed the military was going to recruit all of the world’s most gifted gamers to do . But his timeline and journal entries were filled with ominous references to games, films, and shows about alien visitors, both friendly and hostile: Space Invaders, E.T., The Thing, Explorers, Enemy Mine, Aliens, The Abyss, Alien Nation, They Live. …
    I shook my head vigorously, as if it were possible to shake out the crazy.
    Nearly two decades had elapsed since my father had first written all of this stuff in his journal, and in all that time, no secret government videogame conspiracy had ever come to light. And that was because the whole idea had been a product of my late father’s overactive—perhaps even borderline delusional—imagination. The guy had grown up wanting to be Luke Skywalker or Ender Wiggin or Alex Rogan so badly that he’d concocted this elaborate, delusional fantasy in an attempt to make it so.
    And that, I told myself, was probably the exact same sort of starry-eyed wanderlust that had triggered my Glaive Fighter hallucination. Maybe the whole incident had even been inspired by the contents of the very journal I now held in my hands. Maybe the memory of my father’s conspiracy theory had been sitting up in a forgotten corner of my brain all these years, like a discarded crate of dynamite sticks sweating drops of nitroglycerine onto my subconscious.
    I took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, comforted by my half-assed self-diagnosis. Nothing but a mild flare-up of inherited nuttiness, brought on by my lifelong dead-dad fixation and somewhat related self-instituted overexposure to science fiction.
    And I had been spending way too much time playing videogames lately—especially Armada . I played it every night and all day on the weekends. I’d even ditched school a few times to play elite missions on servers in Asia that were scheduled in the middle of the day over here. Clearly I had been overdoing it for some time now. But that was easy enough to remedy. I would just go cold turkey for a while, to clear my head.
    Sitting there in the dusty attic, I made a silent vow to quit playing Armada entirely for two full weeks—starting right after the elite mission scheduled later that night, of course. Bailing on that wasn’t even really an option. Elite missions only rolled out a few times a year, and they usually revealed new plot developments in the game’s ongoing storyline.
    In fact, I had spent the past week practicing and preparing for tonight’s mission, playing Armada even more than I normally did. I’d probably been seeing Glaive Fighters in my sleep. No wonder I was seeing them when I was awake now, too. I just needed to cut myself off. To take a break. Then everything would be fine. I would be fine.
    I was still repeating those words to myself, like a mantra, when my phone