Armada Chapter 18: Zack’s Dad Has Another F***ing Conspiracy Theory

You know the drill. Things aren’t what they appear to be, the aliens don’t make sense, the 80s were great, blah blah blah.

Armada: Chapter 18

Zack’s dad takes Zack to a secluded, off-limits part of the moon base: the only spot without any EDA cameras or microphones. Naturally, the first thing they do with their newfound privacy is make some pop culture references.

He leaned toward a small microphone [at] a neaby security console […]
“Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” he recited [and] grinned at me. “See? Sweet, sweet privacy.”
“Right, we wouldn’t want the Cigarette Smoking Man to eavesdrop on us,” I muttered.

I know that we’ve criticized the excessive amount of pop culture references in literally every single post so far, and you probably get the point by now that, golly gee, Ernest Cline sure uses a lot of pop culture references. But this one actually doesn’t make sense. They didn’t go there to open doors, and the EDA monitoring has nothing to do with opening doors either, nor is the EDA a hostile artificial intelligence, so… is any of this reference applicable to this situation? What is this joke doing?

Zack observes that the room is a mess of his dad’s notes and diagrams, and “looked like the lair of a homicide detective on some TV show – one who had spent decades tracking a serial killer no one else believed existed”. So I guess we’re suddenly supposed to be skeptical of Zack’s dad’s conspiracy theory about the aliens, even though Zack himself has voiced the same suspicions ever since the aliens were introduced.

“I’ve never shared any of this with either Shin or Graham” […]
“I’ve been asking myself the same questions [but] I just… didn’t think learning the answers could make any difference now.”

But it’s different because, uh, his dad is crazy! Because the book said so. That’s all you need to see how these two characters are totally different, right?

“You know who Finn Argobast is,” he [asked].
“The fake founder of Chaos Terrain?”

Oh my god. Zack. Are you paying any attention to this book that you’re in? He is obviously a real person; this is like the eighth time this has happened.

“I was his primary military consultant when he and the Chaos Terrain team were developing Terra Firma and Armada“

Obviously.

Zack’s dad explains that in order to make the game as realistic as possible, Argobast was given access to all of the information the EDA had on the aliens, and that he was able to secretly access this classified data.

“Everything I learned from [the top-secret data] confirmed the theory I’d already been forming for almost a decade.”
I nodded, trying to hide how nervous he was making me.

Ok, but does anyone believe for a second that Zack is nervous about his dad having a conspiracy theory about the true nature of the aliens? Zack was told about the aliens and I didn’t even have to turn the page before he started questioning it. So Armada depends on this weird thing where the reader has to simultaneously believe that Zack is right to be skeptical about the aliens but also that someone else’s skepticism is a sign of madness. Which is… just a little contradictory. ARE YOU SUSPICIOUS OR NOT, ZACHARY?

Zack’s dad infodumps (lots of that when the antagonist of your story is literally never present, as it turns out) that ever since the first contact, the aliens have been sending unsettling video messages back to Earth: edited compilations of both real and fictional conflict.

images of real-life war were intercut with scenes from a lot of old war movies and television series. It almost seemed as if the Europans were unable to differentiate between reality and fiction. Either that, or they were intercutting the two on purpose, in an effort to make some kind of point. […] I also began to spot brief scenes taken from dozens of science fiction films – all of them featuring hostile alien invaders of some kind. […]
“These images, and the way in which they’re arranged – I think it’s some kind of message, Son,” he said. “An intentionally cryptic one. It’s like – like they’re holding up a mirror, so that we can see ourselves from their perspective.”

If you can explain it in under twenty words, is it really that cryptic?

Zack’s dad explains one of his key bits of evidence:

“Each of these bursts of images ends with a series of five tones.”
It was [from] Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The five tones the government has their keyboardist start off with [when trying to communicate with] the aliens at the end of the movie.

Ernest Cline helpfully explains what this sounds like.

La-Luh-La-BAH-BAH!

I’d never liked that film – probably because of how easy it was for the main character, Roy Neary, to (spoiler alert) leave his family at the very end of the film. It hit a little too close to home.

Uh… didn’t Zack just find out that his father was actually alive and left his family… you know… today?

“I think they watched all of the science fiction films and television shows we’ve made that depict an alien invasion of our planet, and realized it was one of our species’ worst nightmares. So they set about making it happen. They proceeded to stage an alien invasion just like the ones we’d always imagined. […]
“Why else would they slap a giant swastika on the surface of Europa – it was a trap, and we walked right into it! Just like Admiral Fucking Ackbar!”
Under other circumstances, this might have made me laugh.

Oh, good. Zack’s also getting sick of how every single plot point in Armada is communicated vis a vis a pop culture reference.

“Instead of attacking us, they lured us into some sort of weird arms race. Then they gradually let us close the technological gap between us and them. […] Their behavior doesn’t make any sense – unless they’re testing us. It’s the only logical explanation.”

Despite this being almost exactly how Zack expressed criticism of the alien’s motives and strategy when he first learned about the aliens back in chapter 10, Zack is somehow not on board.

“You can’t impose human logic on alien behavior, right? Why should anything they do make sense to us? Their culture and motives might be… you know, ‘beyond our human understanding’.” [I said]

I mean, this is a VERY good point. But why is Zack saying this? What Zack’s dad just said isn’t that different from what Zack himself thought in chapter 10:

why had our enemy made the task so easy for us? According to what we’d just been told, the Europans had not only let us capture several of their vessels, they’d then given us enough time to figure out how they worked, to build our own fleet of ships with the same capabilities. […] I was sure there was more to this story than they were telling us. A lot more.

SO WHY IS HE SO SKEPTICAL NOW? Nothing has happened to Zack to make him change his mind about how suspicious this all looks, so why is this idea suddenly too out-there for Zack? Which is pretty ironic, since the entire plot of this book is which things do and don’t make sense.

Zack and his dad argue about this “the aliens are testing” theory, and they end at pretty much the one big remaining question: testing us about what?

“I don’t know, Son,” he said, his voice still calm and even despite his expression. “Maybe they wanted to see how our species would handle itself during an encounter with another intelligent species? A potentially hostile one? That’s one of the classic tropes of science fiction. Aliens are always showing up to put humanity on trial.” […]
“But this isn’t science fiction, General,” I said, feeling as if I were the adult in this conversation […] “It’s real life, remember?”
“Life imitates art,” he said.

And sometimes art imitates art.

“Take the Disruptor, for example,” he said. […] “It’s a huge, nearly indestructible doomsday weapon, but it has a small Achilles’ heel that will allow us to destroy it. […] It’s like they designed it that way – so that at least one pilot has to sacrifice themselves to destroy it.”

Wait, they do? Nobody sacrificed themselves in the story about how they destroyed a Disruptor that Zack’s dad told us two chapters ago. Guess Zack’s dad is gonna sacrifice himself, then. That wasn’t subtle.

“I think that’s what they’re doing: presenting us with a choice. We can try to destroy them, thereby ensuring that they destroy us,” he said. “Or we can take a gamble, based on our deductions and our moral reasoning, and try to stop the [EDA’s secret weapon].
“I wanted to explain myself to you first. So you’ll understand any actions I may be forced to take.”

…ok, now would be a good time to allow Zack to be kind of suspicious of his dad’s ideas. Too bad Zack was suspicious of this entire infodump chapter just based on… whatever that was about…