Only You Can Save Mankind

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

He'd taken one mouthful when something slammed into the ship. A red glare filled the cabin; alarms started to blare.

He looked up in time to see a ship curving away for another run.

He hadn't even glanced at the radar.

He'd been eating his tea!

He spun the ship. The multi-vitamin sandwich flew around into the wiring somewhere.

It was coming back to get him. He prodded furiously at the control panel.

Hang on ...

What was the worst that could happen to him?

He could wake up in bed.

He took his time. He dodged. He weaved. Another missile hit the ship. As the attacker roared past, Johnny fired, with everything.

Another cloud of wreckage.

No problem.

But it must have fired a missile just before he got it. There was another red flash. The lights went out. The ship jumped. His head bounced off the seatback and banged on to the control panel.

He opened his eyes.

Right. And you wake up back in your bedroom.

A light winked at him.

There was something beeping.

Bound to be the alarm clock. That's how dreams end

He lifted his head. The flashing light was oblong. He tried to focus.

There were shapes there.

But they weren't saying 6:3=.

They were spelling out 'AIR LEAK', and behind the insistent beeping was a terrible hissing sound.

No, no, he thought. This doesn't happen.

He pushed himself up. There were lots of red lights. He pressed some buttons hurriedly, but this had no effect at all except to make some more lights go red.

He didn't know much about the controls of a star- ship, other than fast, slow, left, right and fire, but there were whole rows of flashing alarms which suggested that a lot of things he didn't know about were going wrong. He stared at some red letters which said 'SECONDARY PUMPS FAILURE'. He didn't know what the secondary pumps were, either, but he wished, he really wished, they hadn't failed.

His head ached. He reached up, and there was real blood on his hand. And he knew that he was going to die. Really die. No, he thought. Please! I'm John Maxwell. Please! I'm twelve. I'm not dying in a spaceship The beeping got louder. He looked at the sign again. It was flashing 6:3= About time, he thought, as he passed out . .

And woke up.

He was at the computer again. It wasn't switched on, and he was freezing cold.

He had a headache, but a tentative feel said there was no blood. It was just a headache.

He stared into the dark black screen, and wondered what it felt like to be a ScreeWee.

It felt like that, except that you didn't wake up. It was always AIR LEAK, or *Alert*Alert*Alert* beep- ing on and off, and then perhaps the freezing cold of space, and then nothing.

He had breakfast.

You got a free alien in every pack of sugar-glazed Snappiflakes. It was a new thing. Or an old thing, being tried again.

The one that ended up in his bowl was orange and had three eyes and four arms. And it was holding a ray gun in each hand.

His father hadn't got up. His mother was watching the little television in the kitchen, where a very large man disguised as an entire desert was pointing to a lot of red and blue arrows on a map.

He went down to Neil Armstrong Mall.

He took the plastic alien with him. That'd be the way to invade a planet. One alien in every box! Wait until they were in every cupboard in the country, send out the signal and bazaam!

Cereal killers!

Maybe on some other planet somewhere you got a free human in every packet of ammonia-coated Snappi- crystals. Hey, zorks! Collect the Whole Set! And there'd be all these little plastic people. Holding guns, of course. You just had to walk down the Street to see that, of course, everyone had a gun.

He looked out of the bus window.

That was it, really. No-one would bother to put plastic aliens inside the plastic cereal if they were just, you know, doing everyday things. Holding the Cosmiczippo RayTM hedge clippers! Getting on the MegadeathTM bus! Hanging out at the Star Thruster Mall!

The trouble with all the aliens he'd seen was that they either wanted to eat you or play music at you until you became better people. You never got the sort that just wanted to do something ordinary like borrow the lawn mower.

Wobbler and Yo-less and Bigmac were trying to hang out by the ornamental fountain, but really they were just hanging around. Yo-less was wearing the same grey trousers he wore to school. You couldn't hang out in grey trousers. And Wobbler still wore his sunglasses, except they weren't real sunglasses because he had to wear ordinary glasses anyway; they were those clip-on sunglasses for tourists. Also, they weren't the same size as the glasses underneath, and had rubbed red marks on his nose. And he wore an anorak. Wobbler was probably the only person in the universe who still wore an anorak. And Bigmac. in addition to his camou- flage trousers and 'Terminator' T-shirt with 'Blackbury Skins' on the back in biro, had got hold of a belt made entirely of cartridge cases. He looked stupid.

'Yo, duds,' said Johnny.

'We've been here ages,' said Yo-less.

'I went one stop past on the bus and had to walk back,' said Johnny. 'Thinking about other things. What's happening?'

'Do you mean what's happening, or sort of hey, my man, what's happening?' said Wobbler.

'What's happening?' said Johnny.

'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 unbreak- able copy protection.' 'Did they say it was any good?' said Bigmac. 'Who cares?' 'You'll get caught one day,' said Yo-less. 'Then you get given a job in Silicon Valley, designing antipiracy software,' said Wobbler. Behind his two thicknesses of glasses, his eyes lit up. Wobbler thought that California was where good people went when they died.

'No, you don't. You just get in trouble and you get sued,' said Yo-less. 'And the police take all your com- puters away. There was something in the paper.'

They wandered aimlessly towards the computer shop.

'I saw this film once, right, where there were these computer games and if you were really good the aliens came and got you and you had to fly a spaceship and fight a whole bad alien fleet,' said Bigmac.

'Did you beat it? I mean, in the film, the alien fleet got beaten?'

Bigmac gave Johnny an odd look. 'Of course. Sure. There wouldn't be any point other- wise, would there.' 'Only you can save mankind,' said Johnny. 'What?' 'It's the game,' said Wobbler.

'But it always says something like that on the boxes you get games in,' said Johnny. Except if you get them from Wobbler, he added to himself, when you just get a disc. 'Well. Yeah. Something like that. Why not?'

'I mean they never say, "Only You are going to be put inside a Billion Pounds Worth of Machine with more Switches than 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." They wandered past Mr Zippy's Ice Cream Extravaganza. 'Can't see that catching on,' said Wobbler. 'Can't see them ever selling a game called Get Shot to Pieces.'

'You still having trouble at home?' said Yo-less.

'It's all gone quiet,' said Johnny.

'That can be worse than shouting.'

'Yes.'

'It's not that bad when your mum and dad split up,' said Wobbler, 'although you get to see more museums than is good for you.'

'Still found no aliens?' said Yo-less.

'Um. Not in the game.'

'Still dreaming about them?' said Wobbler.

'Sort of.'

Someone handing out leaflets about Big Savings on Double Glazing gave one, in desperation, to Yo-less. He took it gravely, thanked them, folded it in two and put it in his pocket. Yo-less always filed this sort of thing. You never knew when it might come in handy, he said. One day he might want to doubleglaze his sur- gery, and he'd be in a good position to compare offers.

'Anyone see the war on the box last night?' said Bigmac. 'Way to go, eh?'

'Way to go where?' said Yo-less.

'We're really kicking some butt!'

'Some but what?' said Wobbler.

'We'll give them the "Mother-in-law of All Battles", eh?' said Bigmac, still trying to stir some patriotism.

'Nah. It's not like real fighting,' said Wobbler. 'It's just TV fighting.'

'Wish I was in the army,' said Bigmac, wistfully. 'Blam!' He shot the double-glazing lady, who didn't notice. Bigmac had a habit of firing imaginary guns. Other people played air guitar, he shot air rifles.

'Couple more years,' he said. 'That's all.'

'You ought to write to Stormin' Norman,' said Wobbler. 'Ask him to keep the war going until you get there.'

'He's done pretty well for someone called Norman,' said Yo-less. 'I mean ... Norman? Not very macho, is it? It's like Bruce, or Rodney.'

'He had to be Norman,' said Wobbler, 'otherwise he couldn't be Stormin'. You couldn't have Stormin' Bruce. Come on.'

J&J Software was always packed on a Saturday morn- ing. There were always a couple of computers running games, and always a cluster of people gathered round them. No-one knew who J&J were, since the shop was run by Mr Patel, who had eyes like a hawk. He always watched Wobbler very carefully, on the fairly accurate basis that Wobbler distributed more games than he did and didn't even charge anyone for them.

The four of them split up. Bigmac wasn't much interested in games, and Yo-less went down to look at the videos. Wobbler had found someone who knew even more complicated stuff about computers than he did himself.

Johnny mooched along the racks of games. I wonder if the ScreeWee do this, he thought. Or people on Jupiter or somewhere. Go down to a shop and buy 'Shoot the Human' games. And have films where there's a human running around the place ter- rorizing a spaceship- He became aware of a raised voice at the counter.

You didn't often get girls in J&J Software. Once, quite a long time ago, during a bit of time she'd set aside for parenting, Johnny's mother had tried playing a game. It had been quite a simple one - you had to shoot asteroids and flying saucers and things. It had been embarrassing. It had been amazing that the flying saucers had even bothered to shoot back. More likely they should have parked and all the aliens could have looked out of the windows and made rude noises. Women didn't have a clue.

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. This was because he'd met people like Wobbler before.

The boys watched in fascinated horror.

She kept tapping the offending box with a finger.

'And who wants to see nothing but stars?' she said. 'I've seen stars before, actually. It says on the box that you fight dozens of different kinds of alien ships. There isn't even one.

Mr Patel muttered something. Johnny wasn't close enough to hear. But the girl's voice had a kind of pene- trating quality, like a corkscrew. When she spoke in italics, you could hear them.

'Oh, no. You can't say that. Because how can I tell if it works without trying it? That comes under the Sale of Goods Act (1983).'

The awed watchers were astonished to see a slightly hunted look in Mr Patel's eyes. Up until now he'd never met anyone who could pronounce brackets.

He muttered something else.

'Copy it? Why should I copy it? I've bought it. It says on the box you meet fascinating alien races. Well, all I got was one ship and some stupid message on the screen and then it ran away. I don't call that fascinating alien races.'

Message

Ran away

Johnny sidled closer.

Mr Patel muttered something else, and then turned to one of the shelves. 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.

Then he held up his hand, nodded at the girl, and stalked over to one of the shop's own computers, the ones with so many fingermarks on the keys that you couldn't read them any more.

Everyone watched in silence as he loaded up the copy of the game that the girl had brought back. The music came on. The title scrolled up the screen, like the one in Star Wars. It was the usual stuff: 'The mighty ScreeWee fleet have attacked the Federation,' whatever that was, 'and only you...

And then there was space. It was computer space - a sort of black, with the occasional star rolling past.

'There ought to be six ships on the first mission,' said someone behind Johnny.

Mr Patel scowled at him. He pressed a key cautiously.

'You've just fired a torpedo at nothing, Mr Patel,' said Wobbler.

Finally Mr Patel gave up. He waved his hands in the air.

'How d'you find the things to shoot?' he said.

'They find you,' said someone. 'You should be dead by now.'

'See?' said the girl. 'You get nothing but space. I left it on for hours, and there was just space.'

'Maybe you're not persevering. You kids don't know the meaning of the word persevere,' said Mr Patel.

Wobbler looked over the shopkeeper's head to Johnny and raised his eyebrows.

'It's like persistently trying,' said Johnny helpfully. 'Oh. Right. Well, I persistently tried the other night and I didn't find any, either.'

Mr Patel carefully unwrapped the new copy of the game. The shop watched as he slotted the disc into the computer.

'Then let us see what the game looks like before Mr Wobbler plays his little tricks,' he said.

There was the title screen. There was the story, such as it was. And the instructions.

And space.

'Soon we shall see,' said Mr Patel.

And then more space.

'This one was only delivered yesterday.' Lots more space. That was the thing about space. Mr Patel picked up the box and looked at it carefully, But they'd all seen him take off the polythene.

They've gone, thought Johnny.

Even on the new games.

They've all gone.

People were laughing. But Wobbler and Yo-less were staring at him.