Late August 2008: I’m sitting at home alone, I haven’t spoken in hours, I’m contentedly detached from the world with cobwebs forming on my cock as I stare unblinkingly at the television, a cigarette long burnt to the filter encrusted on my lower lip, my dinner half-eaten, cold, and now being dragged along the floor by my trio of fierce felines when they noticed I didn’t so much as attempt to stop them from pulling the pizza off the table, and the work clothes I laundered on permanent press are probably wrinkled all to shit from sitting in the dryer for ages, completely forsaken. I’ve forgotten what any form of moisture on my eyes feels like, my thumbs are blistered and most likely irreparably damaged, and several vertebrae are presumably dislodged permanently from the slouched posture I’ve assumed for so long.I am playing Tetris, and I am fucking huge.About the only sensible thing running through my head in the last few hours is my pride in having some Ukrainian heritage, probably the reason my ass is so fantastically awesome at this puzzle/game/measuring-stick-of-human-worthiness; and that’s not really sensible. I sat entranced by what was happening; shortly, I was actually going to reach the ‘end’ of Tetris, more points could no longer be accumulated, and I had no idea what might happen when this came to pass. The heralded ‘Great Collapse’? Perhaps I might undergo some metamorphosis and emerge as some highly evolved creature? Maybe I’d just work myself up enough to shit my britches.I haven’t once cleared a line off the screen that wasn’t part of a Tetris, I not even giving any consideration to the pieces that are falling somewhere near the speed of light before clearing away another four lines at a time but somehow they keep falling just as needed and suddenly, the score reaches the point where the counter can’t continue any further, the screen momentarily goes blank, and a message in tiny white letters appears against the black background: “Well Done!”I flop back completely aghast: Well-fucking-done, I croak sadly. The majestic congratulation blinks off the screen seconds later, leaving me completely insane with rage. “Well fucking done!” I begin screaming, before foolishly whipping the NES controller into my girlfriend's 42” Viera with velocity enough to impress a major league scout. As the controller makes contact, half of Illinois loses power, from Champaign to Chicago it’s lights out. I sit in the quiet blackness and eventually get around to peeling my perspiring beanbag off my left thigh, a necessary act I’d neglected for quite some time.Two Days Later: Proper blame still hadn’t been attributed to the blackout that begat a looting and raping spree unheard of since Katrina, and I’m counting a bunch of change in the living room, hoping I might be able to scrape together adequate funds to get a replacement Viera on layaway. After seeing how few dollars I managed to yield from three years of savings, I’m disheartened and decide to walk to the corner 7-11 and get a some beer to begin numbing the pain. I get outside and sniff my fingers; they reek of pocket-change, when what appears to be a Saturn SL-1 pulls up to my townhouse, piloted by a silly old geezer.“Say, Sonny-Boy,” this relic says, “It’s rumored that someone at this address managed to conquer Tetris; do you know who might have accomplished this stunning feat?”“I am the badass of which you speak,” I reply smugly, completely ignorant to the fact this weirdo might be some super-secret ComEd agent trying to discover exactly who’s at fault for the power outage. Some gay banter follows, in which I learn that the fiend accosting me is named Cepheus, and that he’s a delegate for some agency agreeable to rewarding my proficiency at Tetris with some major honor; benefits apparently include some space travel, danger abound, introduction to alien species, and maybe even a new television. This seems to beat the hell out of sorting out a bucket of change, so I accept this uncanny invitation.A Few Hours Later: Cepheus and I emerge from a wormhole, in orbit around our destination, planet Coqinass. In our brief travels, Cepheus has filled me in on some of the details; Coqinass the core planet in some sort of galactic alliance which promotes peace throughout the cosmos, but recent treachery is threatening their way of life; a disgruntled member of their high council has turned traitor and joined forces with a warlike group of savages who have been salivating for a chance to mount an assault on this serene planet for some time. I’m told that this event would suck, and the ‘League’ (as this group of benevolent bitches is dubbed) would crumble, giving way to catastrophe and havoc on a scale my simple mind couldn’t possibly imagine. Appealing to my own sense of self-preservation, should I not give a damn about the galaxy at large, Cepheus is shrewd enough to reiterate multiple times that once the League is cast aside, Earth will have no proper defenders and I can kiss my white ass goodbye. I again confirm that I’m no stranger to danger, and that I’m happy to lend my considerable talents to this just cause. Cepheus assures me this is wise, and excellent.We descend, Cepheus lands his SL-1 outside ‘Headquarters’, which is stylistically identical to the Kremlin, except that it happens to built on a scale ten times larger. I am briefly introduced to the assembled millions to unbelievable fanfare, and the leader of this League makes a moving speech assuring this sprawling miscellany of alien species that with my arrival, everything is now in place, and victory is assured. I’m glowing, I knew I kicked ass, but didn’t know on how tremendous a scale. I am escorted in royal fashion to my work, which is about the only thing which hasn’t been elaborated on at this point, and we arrive to what appears to be a giant freightyard littered with Tetris pieces.“This is where the barracks need to be constructed,” Cepheus informs me; “Until you were discovered, our troops have been sleeping in tents and caves, and moral has been hella low.” He made a sweeping gesture over the tetris blocks. “These are pre-fabricated components of the barracks which must be assembled, and you’ll work with your partner, Greg, to raise the structures.” I was introduced to Greg, a bespectacled human dork wearing a Weezer shirt, who gave me a quick rundown of his story; Cepheus swindled him after he’d shown revealed his unparalleled skillz at the Big Prize game back home in Omaha, by picking the machine clean of it’s bounty with that troublesome claw mechanism. Greg also had delusions of grandeur when approached, and is now relegated to operating the crane which will lift and drop the pre-fab pieces for me to remotely manipulate with an NES controller. Cepheus gave us the final details: that each barrack was to be four units (or one ‘tetris’) high, how honored we should be to be providing this service to the League, and showed us where the shitter was and advised that lunch breaks were to be thirty minutes long. October 2008: After a month of this tedium, Greg and I had constructed about forty-thousand barracks, and were duly dismissed, with much gratitude. Unable to provide a replacement Viera, or US currency with which to buy one, Cepheus offered to help me in any way possible as recompense for our efforts. I had an idea; I turned over my journal entries of this whole ordeal to the charlatan and asked him to send it back in time to some major movie studios, assuming that I’d arrive back on Earth incalculably rich from the box-office profits of this harrowing tale and considered the most promising young screenwriter in my altered future. Cepheus laughed at the idea but ultimately complied, and took us back home. My plan failed miserably, upon arriving back to my crappy townhouse, the only change I was able to detect was that I now had a remembrance of some 80’s sci-fi disaster called “The Last Starfighter”, a complete rip-off of my trials and tribulations on behalf of the League. Apparently, some asshole in Hollywood thought the story lacked any intrigue and re-wrote the screenplay enough to justify removing my name from the credits, replacing Tetris with some ‘shoot-em-up’ game, turning geeky Greg into some iguana-like alien navigator named Grig, and transforming my character into some whiny bitch that ends up the gunnery master aboard the lone spaceship that defeats the encroaching Ko-Dan armada and the nefarious traitor Xur. While I didn’t see so much as a cent for my chronicle of my efforts, the studio made sure that anyone looking to make a buck off “The Last Starfighter” was given their chance; Starfighter action figures, lunchboxes, the video game, and of course, the Alan Dean Foster novelization. I’ve noticed that Mr. Foster does actually come up with unique stories and sagas of his own, but I don’t know where the guy finds the time: it seems to me that every sci-fi movie novelization I have is written by this dude (a stunning three books, aside from this book). I can see why so many screenwriters turn to this guy, he pretty much covers the movie spot on, and the creative liberties he does take generally fit well with the characters presented in the film. The biggest drawback was that he seemed to have the interstellar money-grubber Centauri diverge into a little too much scientific jargon, but he did a good job expressing the sentiments and hostilities toward Xur aboard the command ship of the Ko-Dan armada. If you’ve somehow managed not to watch “The Last Starfighter” for a couple months while chugging Schweppes and chomping circus peanuts in your mom’s basement between playing World of Warcraft, let me suggest that you take a walk on the wild side and check out the book.
