Zackary Lightman

Zack Lightman is the main protagonist in Armada. He lived alone with his mother, Pamela Lightman, after his father, Xavier Ulysses Lightman, supposedly died in a sewage plant accident. After he is recruited by the EDA, he discovers that his father is still alive. Zack is 6th in the ranking of best pilots in the Armada video game and because of this, he is one of the five new recruits that were assigned to Moon Base Alpha (the other four being Debbie, Lila, Milo, Chén). Zack also has a romantic relationship with Lex, a top-notch Terra Firma player. His age of recruitment is 18. He and his parents are from the small town of Beaverton, Oregon.

At the beginning of the novel, Zack is something of a troubled teenager, in the first year of high school, he got into a fight with a bully named Douglas Knotcher, in which Zack lost control of himself and almost killed Knotcher. Since then the rest of the school mostly avoids Zack, his only friends are his classmates (and fellow gamers) Michael Cruz and Michael Diehl, and his boss, store-owner Ray Wierzbowski. Zack's last year in school is particularly stressing because (after years of avoiding each other) he has to share his classes with Knotcher... and also with his ex-girlfriend Ellen Adams. To make matters worse, Zack at this point believes that his father was a paranoid and maybe was in the early stages of a mental illness when he died, due to a notebook in which Xavier wrote his suspicions of a government conspiracy around video games and science-fiction movies, and Zack biggest fear is that such mental condition is hereditary.

Although Zack stops worrying about suffering some kind of insanity after being recruited by the EDA, he is still very sceptic and critical of anything and everything, from the tactics and behaviour of the Europans to his father theories about the invader's real intentions. Zack also has conflicting feelings about his father, in one hand he is happy that he's alive and can be with him, but also he's very angry because of the difficulties of growing up without a dad (and of thinking that his dad died in such a bizarre and undignified way).

                                                  

    Zach Lightman Fan Art Credit