They came for our water, but they’ll settle for our blood.

 

Thirteen-year-old Wyatt has a lethal, monster-killing high score in his favourite first-person-shooter video game, but he still hasn’t been drafted for the upcoming junior championships. And he needs to be in the fight. With parents who are high-profile engineers at the national water-supply corporation, Wyatt has been called a privileged “Water Baby” his whole life, while so many others struggle to get access to affordable taps. He’s determined to prove everyone wrong, and make a new name for himself.

 

But when Wyatt discovers a water-guzzling monster from the game drinking from his bathroom sink, he begins to suspect that the upcoming tournament is about more than prize money. It appears to be a smokescreen for training young recruits in a coming conflict, and Wyatt wants to take up arms for the future.

 

His insider knowledge gets him recruited, but the other players will prove to be killer competition, especially when he learns that his old friend living far below the hydration line is in play. Wyatt is ready to stop feeling useless, to help the dehydrated masses, and to show the world that he’s a new kind of hero—with braces, glasses, and bad posture—by hunting down and wiping out every last monster…before it’s GAME OVER for his friend, and all of humanity.

​

 

But when it’s impossible to tell

what is real and what isn’t,

how can he trust anyone,

including himself?

​

 

Set in a speculative water-scarce Toronto, Matteo L. Cerilli’s latest is a high-octane gamer-based narrative that questions the ethics of our new technology and how it defines our very reality. From kill counts to friendly fire, cold-blooded monsters to warm-blooded villains, CALL2ARMS presents challenging social commentary on the violence of video games, prevalence of gun culture, the abuse of power in the military-industrial complex, dwindling natural resources as the result of the ever-worsening environmental crisis, and the rising tide of inequity.