Only You Can Save Mankind

'Oh, you got some more.' His father stood up. 'I expect it's all more complicated now, though.'

'Yes.'

'Done your homework, have you?'

'Yes.'

'What was it?'

'History. Had to write about Christopher Columbus.'

'Hmm? You could put in that he didn't set out to discover America. He was really looking far Asia and found America by accident.'

'Yes. It says that in the encyclopedia.'

'Glad to see you're using it.'

'Yes. It's very interesting.'

'Good. Right. Right, then. Well, I'm going to have another look at those accounts.'

'Right.'

'If there's anything you want to talk about, you know.'

'All right.'

Johnny waited until he heard the living-room door shut again. He wondered if he ought to have asked where the instruction manual for the dishwasher was.

He switched on the computer.

After a while, the screen for Only You Can Save Mankind came on. He watched the introductory bit moodily, and then picked up the joystick.

There weren't any aliens.

For a little while he thought he'd done something' wrong. He started the game again.

There were still no aliens. All there was, was the blackness of space, sprinkled with a few twinkling stars.

He flew around until he was out of fuel.

No ScreeWee, no dots on the radar screen. No game.

They'd gone.

3

Cereal Killers

There was more news these days than normal. Half the time the TV was showing pictures of tanks and maps of deserts with green and red arrows all over them, while in the corner of the screen would be a photo of a journalist with a phone to his ear, talking in a crackly voice.

It crackled in the background while Johnny phoned up Wobbler.

'Yes?' 'Can I speak to Wob ... to Stephen, please?' Mutter, clonk, bump, scuffle. 'Yes?' 'It's me, Wobbler.' 'Yes?'

'Have you had a look at Only You Can Save Mankind lately?' 'No. Hey, listen, I've found a way to' 'Could you have a go with it right now, please?' Pause. 'You all right?' 'What?' 'You sound a bit weird.'

'Look, go and have a go with the game, will you?'

It was an hour before Wobbler phoned back. Johnny waited on the stairs.

'Can I speak?'

'It's me.'

'There's no aliens, right?'

'Yes!'

'Probably something built into the game. You can do that, you know. A kind of time bomb thing. Maybe it's programmed to make all the aliens vanish on a certain date.'

'What for?'

'Make things more interesting, I expect. Probably Gobi Software will be putting adverts in the computer papers about it. You all right? Your voice sounds a bit squeaky.'

'No problem.'

'You coming down to the mall tomorrow?'

'Yeah.'

'See you, then. Chow.'

Johnny stared at the dead phone. Of course, there were things like that on computers. There'd been some- thing in the papers about it. A Friday the 13th virus, or something. Something in the program kept an eye on the date, and when it was Friday the 13th it was sup- posed to do something nasty to computers all over the country.

There had been stories about Evil Computer Hackers Menacing Society, and Wobbler had come to school in home-made dark glasses for a week.

Johnny went back and watched the screen for a while. Stars occasionally went past.

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 writ- ten 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.'

Johnny watched the screen for a bit longer. Once or twice he nudged the joystick, to go on a different course. It didn't make much difference. Space looked the same from every direction.

'Hello? Anybody there?' he whispered.

He watched some television before he went to bed. There were some more missiles, and someone going on about some other missiles which were supposed to knock down the first type of missile.

The fleet travelled in the shape of a giant cone, hun- dreds of miles long. The Captain looked back at it. There were scores of mother ships, hundreds of fighters. More and more kept joining them as news of the surrender spread.

The Chosen One's ship flew a little way ahead of the fleet. It wasn't answering messages.

But no-one was shooting at them. There hadn't been a human ship visible for hours. Perhaps, the Captain thought, it's really working. We're leaving them behind - - -

Johnny woke up in the game.

It was hard to sleep in the starship. The seat started out as the most comfortable thing in the whole world, but it was amazing how uncomfortable it became after a few hours. And the lavatory was a complicated arrangement of tubes and trapdoors and it wasn't, he was beginning to notice, entirely smellproof.

That's what the computer games couldn't give you: the smell of space. It had its own kind of smell, like a machine's armpit. You didn't get dirty, because there was no dirt, but there was a sort of grimy cleanliness about everything.

The radar went ping.

After a while, he could see a dot ahead of him. It wasn't moving much, and it certainly wasn't firing.

He left the fleet and went to investigate.

It was a huge ship. Or, at least, it had been once. Quite a lot of it had been melted off.

It drifted along, absolutely dead, tumbling very. gently. It was green, and vaguely triangular, except for six legs, or possibly arms. Three of them were broken stubs. It looked like a cross between a spider and an, octopus, designed by a computer and made out of hun- dreds of cubes, bolted together.

As the giant hulk turned he could see huge gashes in it, with melted edges. There was a suggestion of floors inside.

He switched on the radio.

'Captain?'

'Yes?'

'Can you see this thing here? 'What is it?'

'We find them sometimes. We think they belonged to an ancient race, now extinct. We don't know what they called themselves, or where they came from. The ships are very old.'

The dead ship turned slowly. There was another long burn down the other side.

'I think they were called Space Invaders,' said Johnny. 'The human name for them?'

'Yes.'

'I thought so.'

Johnny was glad he couldn't see the Captain's face. He thought: No-one knows where they came from, or even what they called themselves. And now no-one ever will.

The radar went ping again.

There was a human ship heading towards the fleet, at high speed.

This time, he didn't hesitate

The point was, the ScreeWee weren't very good at fighting. After the first few games it was quite easy to beat them. They couldn't seem to get the hang of it. They didn't know how to be sneaky, or when to dodge.

It was the same with all of them, come to think of it. Johnny had played lots of games with words like 'Space' and 'Battle' and 'Cosmic' in the titles, and all the aliens were the sort you could beat after a few weeks' playing.

This player didn't stand a chance against a real human.

You got six missiles. Johnny had two streaking away before the enemy was much larger than a dot. Then he just kept his finger on the Fire button until there was nothing left to fire.

A spreading cloud of wreckage, and that was it.

It wasn't as if anyone would die, after all. Whoever had been in there would just have to start the game again.

It felt real, but that was just the dream . .

Dreams always felt real.

He turned his attention to the thing by the control chair. It had a nozzle which filled a paper cup with something like thin vegetable soup, and a slot which pushed out very large plastic bags containing very small things like sandwiches. The bags had to be big to get all the list of additives on. They contained absolutely everything necessary to keep a star warrior healthy. Not happy, but healthy