

Ray was actually stationed in Beaverton, OR to train and keep an eye on Zach.

This is the reason he actually saw an alien space ship that looked like the space ship from his video game and why he was sitting in a government space ship that looked like it was from the video game. Zach has been recruited because he ranks in the top 10 of the video game that is a simulation of the alien attack. Video games were made to train civilians without causing panic. The government has been preparing for an alien attack. On the spaceship Ray explains some things to Zach.


Zach is taken on to the spaceship in front of the whole school and the spaceship flies away. Ray walks out of the spaceship looking for Zach. This is not the alien spaceship he saw the day before, but the government spaceship from his video game. However, the next day when he gets to school, a spaceship lands on his school’s lawn. At first, he questions his sanity because no one else seems to have seen it and there are no news reports of alien space ships. It is the spaceship from the video game he plays. Despite his mother and Ray’s concern, Zach’s only post-high school plan is to work full-time at Starbase Ace.Įverything changes one day when he spots a spaceship from his classroom window. He is two months away from graduating high school. Zach’s life consists of playing video games, obsessing about his father, pining after his ex-girlfriend, hating his nemesis, loving his mother, and working at Starbase Ace. His boss and owner of the store, Ray, acts as his surrogate father. Zach works at the Starbase Ace, which is a used video game store. He also has an ex-girlfriend he can’t forget about, not to mention an arch-nemesis who threats to be his undoing. The other people in Zach’s lives are his two best friends both named Mike, whom he calls by their last name Cruz and Diehl. His only other remaining family is his mother, who is a nurse. Zach has been consumed with the desire to know his father for as long as he can remember. Zach Lightman’s father died when Zach was one.
