The radar went ping.

After a while, he could see a dot ahead of him. It wasn’t moving much, and it certainly wasn’t firing.

He left the fleet and went to investigate.

It was a huge ship. Or, at least, it had been once. Quite a lot of it had been melted off.

It drifted along, absolutely dead, tumbling very gently. It was green, and vaguely triangular, except for six legs, or possibly arms. Three of them were broken stubs. It looked like a cross between a spider and an octopus, designed by a computer and made out of hundreds of cubes, bolted together.

As the giant hulk turned he could see huge gashes in it, with melted edges. There was a suggestion of floors inside.

He switched on the radio.

‘Captain?’

‘Yes?’

‘Can you see this thing here? What is it?’

‘We find them sometimes. We think they belonged to an ancient race; now extinct. We don’t know what they called themselves, or where they came from. The ships are very crude.’

The dead ship turned slowly. There was another long burn down the other side.

‘I think they were called Space Invaders,’ said Johnny.

‘The human name for them?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought so.’

Johnny was glad he couldn’t see the Captain’s face.

He thought: no one knows where they came from, or even what they called themselves. And now no one ever will.

The radar went ping again.

There was a human ship heading towards the fleet, at high speed.

This time, he didn’t hesitate.

The point was, the ScreeWee weren’t very good at fighting. After the first few games it was quite easy to beat them. They couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. They didn’t know how to be sneaky, or when to dodge.

It was the same with all of them, come to think of it. Johnny had played lots of games with words like ‘Space’ and ‘Battle’ and ‘Cosmic’ in the titles, and all the aliens were the sort you could beat after a few weeks’ playing.

This player didn’t stand a chance against a real human.

You got six missiles. Johnny had two streaking away before the enemy was much larger than a dot. Then he just kept his finger on the Fire button until there was nothing left to fire.

A spreading cloud of wreckage, and that was it.

It wasn’t as if anyone would die, after all. Whoever had been in there would just have to start the game again.

It felt real, but that was just the dream . . .

Dreams always felt real.

He turned his attention to the thing by the control chair. It had a nozzle which filled a paper cup with something like thin vegetable soup, and a slot which pushed out very large plastic bags containing very small things like sandwiches. The bags had to be big to get all the list of additives on. They contained absolutely everything necessary to keep a star warrior healthy. Not happy, but healthy . . .