I PARKED IN the empty driveway and killed the engine, but I didn’t get out of the car right away. Instead I sat there gripping the wheel with both hands, peering silently up at the attic window of our little ivy-covered brick house, thinking about the first time I’d gone up there to dig through my father’s old possessions. I’d felt like a young Clark Kent, preparing to finally learn the truth about his origins from the holographic ghost of his own long-dead father. But now I was thinking of a young Jedi-in-training named Luke Skywalker, looking into the mouth of that cave on Dagobah while Master Yoda told him about today’s activity lesson: Strong with the Dark Side of the Force that place is . In you must go, mofo .

So in I went.

When I unlocked the front door of our house and stepped into the living room, Muffit, our ancient beagle, glanced up at me sleepily from where he was stretched out on the rug. A few years earlier he would have been waiting for me just inside the door, yapping like a madman. But the poor guy had now grown so old and deaf that my arrival barely woke him. Muffit rolled onto his back, and I gave his tummy a few quick rubs before heading upstairs. The old dog watched me go, but didn’t follow.

When I finally reached the attic door, I just stood there at the top of the stairs, with one hand on the doorknob. I didn’t open the door. I didn’t go in. Not right away.

First I needed a moment to prepare myself.

HIS NAME WAS Xavier Ulysses Lightman, and he died when he was only nineteen years old. I was still just a baby at the time, so I didn’t remember him. Growing up, I’d always told myself that was lucky. Because you can’t miss someone you don’t even remember.

But the truth was, I did miss him. And I’d attempted to fill the void created by his absence with data, by absorbing every scrap of information about him that I could. Sometimes, it felt like I was trying to earn the right to miss him with the same intensity my mom and his parents had always seemed to.

When I was around ten years old, I entered what I thought of now as my “Garp phase.” That was when my lifelong curiosity about my late father gradually blossomed into a full-blown obsession.

Up until that point, I’d made do with a vague, idealized image of my young father that had gradually formed in my mind over the years. But in actuality, I really only knew four basic facts about him—the same four things I’d heard over and over again throughout my childhood, mostly from my grandparents:

But once my age reached double digits, these vague details were no longer sufficient to satisfy my growing curiosity about him. So, naturally, I began to barrage his widow with questions. Daily. Incessantly. At the time, I was too young and clueless to realize how painful it was for my mother to be endlessly interrogated about her dead husband by his ten-year-old clone. No, my self-involved ass couldn’t seem to connect those glowing neon dots, so I kept right on asking questions, and my mother, trooper that she was, answered them to the best of her ability, for as long as she could.

Then, one day, she handed me a small brass key and told me about the boxes up in our attic.

Until then, I’d always assumed that my mother had donated all of my dad’s stuff to charity after he died, because that seemed like the first thing a young, widowed single mother who was trying to start her life over would do. But that summer day, my mother explained that this was not the case. Instead, she had packed everything he’d owned into cardboard boxes, and when we moved into our current house a few months later—purchased with the payout from the accident settlement—she’d stored all of them up in our attic. She had done this for me, she said, so that when I grew up and wanted to know more about my father, those boxes would be up there waiting for me.

When I finally got the door unlocked and burst into the attic, they were really there—a dozen pristine cardboard moving boxes stacked neatly in a corner beneath the sloping rafters, illuminated by a bright shaft of sunlight. For a long time all I could do was stand there frozen, staring at this tower of time capsules waiting for me to unlock their secrets.

I’d spent the rest of the summer up in that attic, sorting through it all, like an archaeologist unearthing relics in an ancient tomb. It took some time. For a guy who had only made it to the age of nineteen, my dad had managed to amass an awful lot of stuff.

About a third of the boxes were filled with my father’s collection of old videogames—which was actually more of a hoard than a collection. He’d owned five different videogame consoles, along with hundreds of games for each of them. I found the real stockpile, however, on his old PC, which contained thousands of classic arcade and console videogame emulators and ROM files—more games than one person could have possibly played in a single lifetime. My father appeared to have given it a shot, though.

In another box, I found an ancient top-loading VCR. I figured out how to hook it up to the small TV in my bedroom and started watching his old videotapes, one after the other, in whatever order I pulled them out of the box. Most of them contained old science fiction movies and TV shows, along with a lot of science programs taped off of PBS.

There were boxes filled with my father’s old clothes, too. Everything had been way too big on me, but that hadn’t stopped me from trying on every last stitch he’d owned, breathing in the smell as I stared at myself in the dusty attic mirror.

I got really excited when I found a box of old cards and letters among his things, along with a shoebox overflowing with carefully folded love notes my mother had passed him during their classroom courtship. I shamelessly read through them all, gulping down new details about the man who had sired me.

The last box I’d looked through had been the one that contained all of my father’s old role-playing game materials. It was filled with rulebooks, bags of polyhedral dice, character sheets, and a large stack of his old campaign notebooks, each one outlining the minutiae of some fictional reality intended to serve as the setting for one of his role-playing games—and each one providing a small glimpse into my father’s famously overactive imagination.

But one of those notebooks had been different from the others. It had a worn blue cover, and my father had carefully block-printed a single cryptic word in the center of it: PHAËTON .

The yellowing pages within contained a strange list of dates and names, followed by what appeared to be a series of fragmented journal entries, which outlined the details of a global conspiracy my father believed he’d uncovered—a top-secret project involving all five branches of the US military, which he claimed were working in collusion with the entertainment and videogame industries, as well as select members of the United Nations.

At first, I tried to convince myself I was reading an outline for some role-playing game scenario my father had concocted, or notes for some short story he’d never gotten around to writing. But the further I read, the more disturbed I got. It wasn’t written like a piece of fiction. It was more like a long, rambling letter written by a highly delusional mental patient—one who happened to have contributed half of my DNA.

The journal had helped shatter the idealized image I’d constructed of my young father. That was one reason I’d vowed never to look at it again.

But now, the same thing that had happened to him was happening to me. Videogames were infecting my reality too. Had my father also experienced hallucinations? Was he—was I —schizophrenic? I had to know what he’d been thinking, had to dive back into his delusions and learn how they might be linked to my own.

WHEN I FINALLY worked up the courage to open the attic door and step inside, I spotted the boxes right away. I’d restacked them in the dusty corner where I’d first found them. They were unlabeled, so it took me a few minutes of shuffling them around before I found the one filled with my father’s old role-playing games.

I put it down on the floor and began to dig through it, pulling out rulebooks and supplements for games with names like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, GURPs, Champions, Star Frontiers , and Spacemaster . Beneath those was a stack of about a dozen of my father’s old campaign notebooks. The notebook I was looking for was at the very bottom—where I’d hidden it from view over eight years earlier. I pulled it out and held it in my hands and looked at it. It was a battered blue three-subject notebook with 120 college-ruled pages. I brushed my fingertips over the name my father had written on the cover—a name that had haunted me ever since I’d first looked it up: PHAËTON.

In Greek mythology, Phaëton, aka Phaethon, is an idiot kid who guilt-trips his dad, the god Helios, into letting him take his sun chariot for a joy ride. Phaëton doesn’t even have his learner’s permit, so he promptly loses control of the sun, and Zeus has to smite him with a thunderbolt to prevent him from scorching the Earth.

I sat down cross-legged and placed the notebook on my lap, then examined its cover a bit more closely. In the bottom right corner, very small, my father had also printed Property of Xavier Lightman , followed by his home address at the time.

Seeing that address triggered another flood of memories, because it was the same tiny house on Oak Park Avenue where my Grammy and Grampy Lightman had lived. The same house where I used to visit them almost every weekend when I was growing up. I would sit on their ancient sofa, eat homemade peanut butter cookies, and listen raptly as they told stories in tandem about their lost son, my lost father. And even though these stories they told about their only child were always laced with an undercurrent of sadness and loss, I still kept coming back to hear them again and again—until they both passed away, too, within a year of each other. Since then, my mother had been forced to bear the terrible burden of being my main living link to my father.

I took a deep breath and flipped the notebook open.

On the inside of its front cover, my father had created some sort of elaborate timeline—or as he’d labeled it, a “Chronology.” This densely packed list of names and dates filled up every centimeter of the cover’s white card-stock backing, and it looked as if my father had created it over a period of months or years, using a variety of pens, pencils, and markers. (No crayons, thankfully.) He’d also circled some of the entries before connecting them to other entries elsewhere on the timeline, using an overlapping web of lines and arrows that made the whole thing look more like an elaborate flowchart than a timeline:

The release of the first Star Wars film in 1977 seemed to be the timeline’s focal point. My father had circled that entry several times and drawn a series of arrows linking it to at least a dozen other items further down the timeline—including a bunch of videogames that the Star Wars franchise had helped inspire, like Space Invaders, Starhawk, Elite , and Wing Commander .

Armada wasn’t listed on my father’s timeline, of course—nor was any other game released in the past eighteen years. His final entry was the one noting the release of Galaxy Quest in 1999. I was born a few months later, and by the time I reached my first birthday, my poor father was already fertilizing daffodils at the local cemetery.

I spent a few more minutes puzzling over the timeline before turning my attention to the notebook’s first page, which contained a pencil drawing of an old-school coin-operated arcade game—one I didn’t recognize. Its control panel featured a single joystick and one unlabeled white button, and its cabinet was entirely black, with no side art or other markings anywhere on it, save for the game’s strange title, which was printed in all capital green letters across its jet black marquee: POLYBIUS.

Below his drawing of the game, my father had made the following notations:

Back when I’d first discovered the journal, I’d done a quick Internet search and learned that Polybius was an urban legend that had been circulating on the Internet for decades. It was the title of a strange videogame that only appeared in one Portland arcade during the summer of 1981. According to the story, the game drove several kids who played it insane; then the machine mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again. In some versions of the story, “Men in Black” were also seen visiting the arcade after closing time, to open up the Polybius machine and download the high scores from its data banks.

But according to the Internet, the Polybius urban legend had already been debunked. Its origins had been traced back to an incident in the summer of 1981, at a now-defunct arcade right here in Beaverton called the Malibu Grand Prix. Some kid collapsed from exhaustion after an Asteroids high score attempt and got taken away in an ambulance. Accounts of this incident were apparently conflated with another rumor circulating in the arcades at that time, about how the Atari arcade game Tempest caused some of the kids who played it to have epileptic seizures—which was actually true.

The Men in Black part of the urban legend also appeared to have roots in reality. In the early ’80s, there had been an ongoing federal investigation into illegal gambling at various Portland-area arcades, and so during that time there really had been FBI agents spotted around local game rooms after closing time, opening up game machines—but this was to check for gambling devices, not to monitor gamers’ high scores.

Of course, none of this information had come to light yet when my father had drawn his sketch of the Polybius game in his notebook sometime in the early ’90s. Back then, Polybius would’ve just been a local urban legend—circulating around the very arcade where it had been born, Malibu Grand Prix. The same arcade my father had frequented when he was growing up.

On the second page of the notebook my father had drawn an illustration of another fictional arcade game, called Phaëton. My father’s sketch of its cabinet was far more elaborate and detailed than his sketch of Polybius —perhaps because he claimed to have seen the game in person. Across the top of the page he’d written: “I saw this game with my own eyes on 8-9-1989 at Malibu Grand Prix in Beaverton, Oregon.”

Then he’d signed his name.

According to his drawing, Phaëton had a sit-down cockpit-style game cabinet, which was sort of capsule shaped, like a TRON light cycle, with fake laser cannons built into each side of it, making the game itself look like a starship. Weirdest of all, it had doors. According to my father’s sketch, the cabinet had two clamshell-shaped hatches made of tinted plexiglass, one on either side of the cockpit seat, which opened straight up, like the doors on a Lamborghini, and sealed you inside while you played the game. He’d also drawn a schematic of its control panel, which featured a four-trigger flight yoke, buttons mounted on each armrest, and another bank of switches on the cockpit ceiling. To me, it looked more like a flight simulator than a videogame. The entire cabinet was black, except for the game’s title—printed in stylized white letters across its side: PHAËTON.

I hadn’t been able to find any mention of a videogame by that name when I’d tried looking it up on the Internet eight years ago. I took out my phone and did another quick search on it. Still, nothing. According to the Internet, there had never been a videogame called Phaëton released anywhere, for any platform. That name had been appropriated for lots of other things, including cars and comic book characters. But there had never been an arcade game released with that title. Which meant the whole thing was probably a figment of my father’s imagination—just like the Glaive Fighter I’d seen just half an hour ago was a figment of mine.

I glanced back at my father’s illustration of the Phaëton cabinet. He’d drawn an arrow to the umlaut over the capital E in the word PHAËTON printed on its side. Next to the arrow he wrote: “Umlaut conceals hidden data port plug for downloading scores!”

As with his Polybius drawing, he’d made several bulleted notations down below—an apparent list of “facts” about the fictional game:

I studied both the Polybius and Phaëton illustration for several more minutes. Then I flipped ahead to the journal entry describing Battlezone.

This part of my father’s conspiracy theory, at least, was true. From what I’d read online, a group of “US Army consultants” really had paid Atari to rework Battlezone into a training simulator for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and the United States Army really had pursued the idea of using videogames to train real soldiers, as early as 1980. As my father had also noted on his strange timeline, the Marine Corps had run a similar operation back in 1996, when they’d modified the groundbreaking first-person shooter Doom II and used it to train soldiers for real combat.

If he’d lived to see it, my father’s timeline probably would have also listed the release of America’s Army in 2002, a free-to-play videogame that had been one of the US Army’s most valuable recruiting tools for over a decade now. An army recruiter had even let us spend a half hour playing it at school, just after we’d finished taking the mandatory ASVAB test—the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. I remembered thinking it was pretty weird that we were being encouraged to play a videogame simulation of warfare, right after being tested on our aptitude for it.

I continued to flip through the faded pages of my father’s notebook, marveling at the time and energy he’d spent researching and puzzling over the details of the elaborate conspiracy he’d believed he was uncovering. Lists of names, dates, movie titles, and half-formed theories were scribbled across every page. But, I realized now, my ten-year-old self had been too hasty in dismissing it as gibberish. There was at least a hint of method lurking behind his seeming madness.

It looked as though the existence of Bradley Trainer and Marine Doom were two of the key pieces of “evidence” behind his vague, half-formed conspiracy theory, along with the classic science fiction novel Ender’s Game , and two old movies, The Last Starfighter and Iron Eagle . My father had highlighted the release dates of these items on his timeline, and later on in the notebook he’d devoted several pages to describing and dissecting their storylines—as if they held crucial clues about the grand mystery he was trying to solve.

I smiled down at the list. I’d never even heard of Iron Eagle until I saw it mentioned in my father’s journal and watched the VHS copy of it I found among his things. The film had instantly become one of my go- to guilty-pleasure movies. The hero of Iron Eagle is an Air Force brat named Doug Masters who learns to pilot an F-16 by cutting class to sneak into the base flight simulator—really just an incredibly expensive videogame. Doug is a natural pilot, but only if he’s rocking out to his favorite tunes. When his dad gets shot down overseas and is taken captive, Doug steals two F-16s and flies over to rescue him, with a little help from Lou Gossett Jr., his Walkman, Twisted Sister, and Queen.

The result was a cinematic masterpiece—although sadly, it appeared to be recognized as such by me alone. Cruz and Diehl had both vowed never to sit through another screening of it. Muffit was still always happy to curl up and watch it with me, though, and our repeated viewings of the film, along with the Snoopy vs. the Red Baron album my mother insisted on playing every Christmas, had served as the inspiration for my Armada pilot call sign: IronBeagle. (When I posted in the Armada player forums, my avatar was an image of Snoopy in his World War I flying ace getup.)

I glanced back at his timeline once again. My father had drawn circles around the entries for Iron Eagle, Ender’s Game , and The Last Starfighter; then he’d added lines connecting them all to each other—and now for the first time I finally understood why. All three stories were about a kid who trained for real-life combat by playing a videogame simulation of it.

I kept flipping pages until I came to the journal’s second-to-last entry. In the center of an empty page my father had written the following question:

The journal’s final entry was an undated, rambling, half-illegible, four-page-long essay in which my father attempted to summarize the threads of his half-formed conspiracy theory and link them together.

“The entire videogame industry is secretly under the control of the US military,” he wrote. “They may have even invented the videogame industry! WHY?”

Aside from his fictional Polybius and Phaëton drawings, he never gave much in the way of evidence. Just his own wild theories.

“The 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 nitroglycerin 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 buzzed a reminder at me. Shit. I’d spent so long up here screwing around that I’d made myself late for work.

I got to my feet and tossed my father’s journal back into its cardboard coffin. Enough was enough. The time had come for me to stop living in the past—my father’s past, especially. A lot of his old stuff had migrated downstairs to my bedroom—an embarrassing amount, I now realized. My room was practically a shrine to his memory. It was high time I grew up and moved some—if not all—of that crap back up here, where I’d found it. Where it belonged.

I’d get started on that tonight, I told myself as I shut the attic door behind me. rRahIJWCtymNq1vfDvVRwKzgy1+kZWyZd1Sq8cJkg2aMgyNMd9hnpv/fPbHheCAK