It's a game, thought Johnny. There's not a real person in that ship. It's someone playing a game. It's all a game. It's just things happening on a screen somewhere. No.
I mean, yes. But... at the same time it's all happening here
His own ship leapt forward.
It was easy. It was so easy. Just line up circles on the screen, binkabinkabinka, and then press the Fire button until every weapon on the ship was empty. He'd done. it many times before.
The invader hadn't even seen him. It launched some missiles - and then blew up in an impressive display of graphics.
That's all it is, Johnny told himself. Just things on a screen. It's not real. There's no arms and feet spinning away through the wreckage. It's all a game.
The missiles arrived
The whole cockpit went blinding white.
He was aware, just for a moment, of cold space around him, with things in it
A bookcase. A chair. A bed.
He was sitting in front of the computer. The screen was blank. He was holding the joystick so hard that he had to concentrate to let go of it.
The clock by his bed said 6:3=, because it was broken. But it meant he'd have to get up in another hour or so.
He sat with his quilt around him watching the television until the alarm went off.
There were some more pictures of missiles and bullets streaking over a city. They looked pretty much the same as the ones he'd seen last night, but were probably back by popular demand.
He felt sick.
Yo-less could help, Johnny decided.
He normally hung out with Wobbler and Bigmac on the bit of wall behind thi school library. They weren't exactly a gang. If you take a big bag of crisps and shake them up, all the little bits end up in one corner.
Yo-less was called Yo-less because he never said 'Yo'. He'd given up objecting to the name by now. At least it was better than Nearly Crucial, which was the last nickname, and MC Spanner, which was the one before that. Johnny was the official nickname generator.
Yo-less said he'd never said 'crucial', either. He pointed out that Johnny was white and never said, 'YerWhat? YerWhat? YerWhat?' or 'Ars-nal! Ars- nal!' and anyway, you shouldn't makejokes about racial stereotyping.
Johnny didn't go into too much detail. He just talked about the dream, and not about the messages on the screen. Yo-less listened carefully. Yo-less listened to everything carefully. It woried teachers, the way he listened carefully to everything they said. They always suspected he was trying to catch them out.
He said, 'What you've got here is a projection of a psychological conflict. That's all. Want a cheese ring?'
'What's that?'
'It's just crunchy cheesy-flavoured-'
'I mean the other thing you said.'
Yo-less passed the packet on to Bigmac.
'Well.. . your mum and dad are splitting up. right? Well-known fact.' 'Could be. It's a bit of a trying time,' said Johnny. 'O-kay. And there's nothing you can do about it.' 'Shouldn't think so,' said Johnny. 'And this definitely affects you,' said Yo-less.
'I suppose so,' said Johnny cautiously. 'I know I have to do a lot of my own cooking.'
'Right. So you project your.., um... suppressed~ emotions on to a computer game. Happens all the time,' said Yo-less, whose mother was a nurse, and who, wanted to be a doctor if he grew up. 'You can't solve the real problems, so you turn them into problems you can solve. Like ... if this was thirty years ago, you'd probably dream about fighting dragons or something. It's a projected fantasy.'
'Saving hundreds of intelligent newts doesn't sound very easy to solve,' said Johnny.
'Dunno,' said Bigmac, happily. 'Ratatatat-blam! No more problem.' Bigmac wore large boots and camouflage trousers all the time. You could spot him a mile off by his camouflage trousers.
'The thing is,' said Yo-less, 'it's not real. Real's real.! But stuff on a screen isn't.'
'I've cracked Stellar Smashers,' said Wobbler. 'You can have that if you want. Everyone says it's a lot better.'
'No-oo,' said Johnny, 'I think I'll stick with this one for a while. See if I can get to level twenty-one.
'If you get to level twenty-one and blow up the whole fleet you get a special number on the screen, and if you write off to Gobi Software you get a five pound token,' said Wobbler. 'It was in Computer Weekly.'
Johnny thought about the Captain.
'A whole five pounds?' he said. 'Gosh.'
It was Games in the afternoon. Bigmac was the only one who played. He'd never been keen until they'd introduced hockey. You got a club to hit people, he said.
Yo-less didn't do sport because of intellectual incom- patibility. Wobbler didn't do sport because the sports master had asked him not to. Johnny didn't do sport because he had a permanent note, and no-one cared much anyway, so he went home early and spent the afternoon reading the manual.
He didn't touch the computer before tea.
There was an extended News, which meant that Cobbers was postponed. There were the same pictures of missiles streaking across a city that he'd seen the night before, except that now there were more jour- nalists in sand-coloured shirts with lots of pockets talking excitedly about them.
He heard his mother downstairs complain about Cobbers, and by the sound of the raised voices that started Trying Times again.
There was some History homework about Christopher Columbus. He looked him up in the encyclopedia and copied out four hundred words, which usually worked. He drew a picture of Columbus as well, and coloured it in.
After a while he realized that he was putting off swit- ching the computer on. It came to something, he thought, when you did school work rather than play games.
It wouldn't hurt to at least have a game of Pac-Man or something. Trouble was, the ghosts would probably stay in the middle of the screen and refuse to come out and be eaten. He didn't think he could cope with that. He'd got enough to worry about as it was.
On top of it all, his father came upstairs to be fatherly. This happened about once a fortnight. There didn't seem to be any way of stopping it. You had to put up with twenty minutes of being asked about how you were getting on at school, and had you really thought about what you wanted to be when you grew up.
The thing to do was not encourage things but as politely as possible.
His father sat on the edge of the bed and looked around the room as though he'd never seen it before.
After the normal questions about teachers Johnny hadn't had since the first year, his father stared at nothing much for a while and then said, 'Things have been a bit tricky lately. I expect you've noticed.'
'No.'
'It's been a bit tricky at work. Not a good time to~ start a new business.'
'Yes.'
'Everything all right?'
'Yes.'
'Nothing you want to talk about?'
'No. I don't think so.'
His father looked around the room again. Then he said, 'Remember last year, when we all went down to Falmouth for the week?'
'Yes.'
'You enjoyed that, didn't you?'
He'd got sunburnt and twisted his ankle on some rocks and he had to get up at 8.30 every morning, even though it was supposed to be a holiday. And the only TV in the hotel was in front of some old woman who never let go of the remote-control.
'Yes.'
'We ought to go again.'
His father was staring at him.
'Yes,' said Johnny. 'That would be nice.'
'How're you getting on with Space Invaders?' 'Sorry?' 'Space Invaders. On the computer.' Johnny turned to look at the blank screen. 'What're Space Invaders?' he said. 'Isn't that what they're called any more? Space Invaders? You used to get them in pubs and things, oh, before you were born. Rows of spiky triangular green aliens with six legs kept on coming down the screen and we had to shoot them.'
Johnny gave this some thought. 'What happened when you'd shot them all, then?'