Editing Ender's Game (section)

== Synopsis ==
{{Ender's Game chronology}}
War breaks out between humans and an insect-like alien race referred to as [[Formics|"buggers"]]. The humans are able to repel the First and Second Invasions by narrow margins. Earth's space military force is the International Fleet (I.F.), which trains gifted children to become commanders at their orbiting Battle School.

[[Andrew "Ender" Wiggin]] is born a "Third": a rare exception to Earth's two-child policy, allowed by the government due to the promise and high intellect displayed by his two older siblings. The eldest, [[Peter Wiggin|Peter]], is a [[antisocial personality disorder|sociopath]] who bullies Ender. His sister, [[Valentine Wiggin|Valentine]], is deeply empathic. The I.F. removed Ender's monitoring device when he was six years old, seemingly ending his chances of Battle School. He is taunted and pushed around by his classmates, led by a school bully named Stilson. Ender viciously retaliates against Stilson. Ender is disturbed that he, through his actions, is becoming more like his brother Peter. Unbeknownst to Ender, Stilson later dies from his wounds. Colonel [[Hyrum Graff]] visits Ender after hearing about the fight. Ender attests that by showing superiority now, he has prevented future struggle. Graff offers him a place in the Battle School.

Once at Battle School, Graff and the other leaders covertly work to keep Ender isolated. Ender finds solace in playing a simulated adventure game that involves being killed by and eventually killing a giant. The cadets participate in competitive war simulations in zero gravity, where Ender quickly masters the competition with novel tactics. To further wear Ender down, he is promoted to command a new army composed of new recruits, then pitted against multiple armies at once, but Ender's success continues. Ender's jealous ex-commander, Bonzo Madrid, draws him into a fight outside the simulation, and once again seeking to preemptively stop future conflicts, Ender uses excessive force, and Bonzo dies from his injuries without Ender being notified.

Meanwhile on Earth, Peter Wiggin uses a global communication system to post political essays under the pseudonym "[[John Locke|Locke]]", hoping to establish himself as a respected orator and then as a powerful politician. Valentine, despite not trusting Peter, agrees to publish alongside him as "[[Demosthenes]]". Their essays are soon taken seriously by the government and the people.

Ender, now ten years old, is promoted to Command School. After some preliminary battles in the simulator, he is introduced to [[Mazer Rackham]], a hero from the First and Second Invasions who saw key patterns in the bugger behavior. Ender participates in space combat simulations created and controlled by Mazer. As the fighting becomes harder, he is joined by some of his friends from the Battle School as sub-commanders. Ender grows depressed by the battles, his isolation, and the way Mazer treats him.

For his final test, under observation by I.F.'s commanders, Ender finds his fleet far outnumbered by bugger ships surrounding their homeworld. He sacrifices his entire fleet to fire a Molecular Disruption Device at the planet. The Device destroys the planet and paralyzes the surrounding bugger fleet. The commanders cheer and celebrate. Mazer informs Ender that the "simulations" were real battles, directing human spacecraft against bugger fleets via an [[ansible]] and that Ender has won the war. Ender realizes that he has committed [[genocide]] and become just like Peter, additionally learning about the deaths of Stilson and Bonzo.

Ender and Valentine join a group of space colonists. On their new planet, Ender becomes the colony's governor. He discovers a structure that matches the simulation of the giant game from Battle School and inside finds the dormant egg of a queen. The bugger queen [[Telepathy|telepathically]] communicates to Ender that before the First Invasion, they had assumed humans were a non-sentient race, for want of [[collective consciousness]], but realized their mistake too late. Instead, she had reached out to Ender to draw him here and requested that he take the egg to a new planet for the buggers to colonize.

Ender takes the egg and, with information from the queen, writes ''[[The Hive Queen (Ender's Game)|The Hive Queen]]'' under the alias "Speaker for the Dead". Peter, now the leader of Earth and 77 with heart failure, recognizes Ender as the author of ''The Hive Queen''. He asks Ender to write a book about him, which Ender titles ''[[Hegemon|The Hegemon]]''. The combined works create a new type of funeral, in which the Speaker for the Dead tells the whole and unapologetic story of the deceased, adopted by many on Earth and its colonies. Ender and Valentine leave the colony and travel to other worlds, looking for a safe place to establish the unborn Hive Queen.