Yo-less could help, Johnny decided.

He normally hung out with Wobbler and Bigmac on the bit of wall behind the school library. They weren’t exactly a gang. If you take a big bag of crisps and shake them up, all the little bits end up in one corner.

Yo-less was called Yo-less because he never said ‘Yo’. He’d given up objecting to the name by now. At least it was better than Nearly Crucial, which was the last nickname, and MC Spanner, which was the one before that. Johnny was the official nickname generator.

Yo-less said he’d never said ‘crucial’, either. He pointed out that Johnny was white and never said, ‘YerWhat? YerWhat? YerWhat?’ or ‘Ars-nal! Ars-nal!’ and anyway, you shouldn’t make jokes about racial stereotyping.

Johnny didn’t go into too much detail. He just talked about the dream, and not about the messages on the screen. Yo-less listened carefully. Yo-less listened to everything carefully. It worried teachers, the way he listened carefully to everything they said. They always suspected he was trying to catch them out.

He said, ‘What you’ve got here is a projection of a psychological conflict. That’s all. Want a cheese ring?’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s just crunchy cheesy-flavoured—’

‘I mean the other thing you said.’

Yo-less passed the packet on to Bigmac.

‘Well . . . your mum and dad are splitting up, right? Well-known fact.’

‘Could be. It’s a bit of a trying time,’ said Johnny.

‘O-kay. And there’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘Shouldn’t think so,’ said Johnny.

‘And this definitely affects you,’ said Yo-less.

‘I suppose so,’ said Johnny cautiously. ‘I know I have to do a lot of my own cooking.’

‘Right. So you project your . . . um . . . suppressed emotions on to a computer game. Happens all the time,’ said Yo-less, whose mother was a nurse, and who wanted to be a doctor if he grew up. ‘You can’t solve the real problems, so you turn them into problems you can solve. Like . . . if this was thirty years ago, you’d probably dream about fighting dragons or something. It’s a projected fantasy.’

‘Saving hundreds of intelligent newts doesn’t sound very easy to solve,’ said Johnny.

‘Dunno,’ said Bigmac, happily. ‘Ratatatat-blam! No more problem.’ Bigmac wore large boots and camouflage trousers all the time. You could spot him a mile off by his camouflage trousers.

‘The thing is,’ said Yo-less, ‘it’s not real. Real’s real. But stuff on a screen isn’t.’

‘I’ve cracked Stellar Smashers,’ said Wobbler. ‘You can have that if you want. Everyone says it’s a lot better.’

‘No-oo,’ said Johnny, ‘I think I’ll stick with this one for a while. See if I can get to level twenty-one.’

‘If you get to level twenty-one and blow up the whole fleet you get a special number on the screen, and if you write off to Gobi Software you get a five-pound token,’ said Wobbler. ‘It was in Computer Weekly.’

Johnny thought about the Captain.