Summary

Chapter 3 takes place in the video game store Zach works in and introduces Ray, the owner. The chapter describes the history between the two. Zach was young when he first started to bike to Ray’s store, Starbase Ace. He used to come to hang out between the hours that school was out and his mother was still working. Eventually, Ray offered him a job. The job consisted of mostly hanging out with Ray, playing video games and eating junk food. Ray had made money selling stocks during the dot-com boom and Starbase Ace was a way for him to spend his early retirement playing video games and talking about video games. For this reason, Ray was not interested in the business making money.

On this day, the brand-new Armada Interceptor Flight Control System had come into the store—a month early. Zach...