Constellation Games

by Leonard Richardson

  So when one of my posts is mirrored to your friendstream and you read it on your fancy contact-lens screen, don't use your single-point integrated contact manager to dictate an IM to me about how Bai needs to man up, bro, and I'm just making things worse. Software has changed since those carefree days at dear old alma mater, and so have we.

  "Well, just don't buy her the stuff," I said, as you are probably saying right now.

  "I don't want to buy her the stuff," said Bai, "but she gets... rrrrrr! You know?"

  "Rrrrrr, huh?"

  Maybe in 2007 a "virtual girlfriend" was an animated GIF that pole-danced on your desktop, but that was pre- the psychological research. Dana is a piece of software complex enough to fulfil whatever emotional needs Bai has right now, and to give a convincing impression of someone with needs of her own. The problem is that her needs are all paid downloadable content, not free things like cuddling. Dana has literally been programmed to want stuff forever and never be satisfied. And if there are "problems" that need "solving", that's the big one.

  "We can't go on like this," said Bai. "It's not healthy. You know phones; you gotta do something."

  "You don't have to use the official store," I said. "There's probably some website in Belarus with free copies of everything. Just put a static DNS lookup in /etc/hosts so she thinks she's shopping at the official store."

  "No," said Bai. "No more stuff. She's got a nice apartment, two cars, hundred-percent-effective birth control—"

  "Birth control?"

  "—top of the line computer, physical and cognitive buffs, I don't even see half her clothes anymore. She's got more shit than I do, and she can't be happy with it. I want her to stop needing things."

  I put my hands in my pockets and looked down the hall at people having fun at my party. I thought about Bai's future. I thought about Bai's money. And, something that surprised me, I thought about Dana.

  A few weeks ago I was trying to get in contact with someone from the Constellation, and they sent me to a submind of Smoke who was dumber than Dana. Dumber than the customer service chatbot for a nearly-bankrupt airline. Smoke-Cursive-Cytoplasm-Snakebite-Singsong-Polychromatic-Musteline only understood YES and NO, and if I said anything else, it had to call up its supermind to ask for a translation. And its supermind would help, would explain my snarky shit in terms of YES and NO, because they were both in this together.

  And here was Dana, created by an evil company trying to maximize DLC sales, who had no one fighting on her side. Who didn't even know a fight was happening.

  "I'll see what I can do," I said.

  "How much?"

  "Three thousand dollars," I said, trying to give us both an out.

  "Okay," said Bai without hesitation.

  "Dude," I said, "you're in deep shit if that's a good deal for you."

  "Don't I know it," said Bai.

  After a quick party status check, I took Bai into my study and docked his phone with my development box. I dumped Bai's environment onto my computer using an overpriced development kit.

  "We're just going to see if it's feasible," I said. I started the SDK and loaded Dana into a sandbox. She came up on the monitor a little blocky: phone resolution.

  "Hi, Jun-Feng," said Dana in what I guess is her sexy voice, watching us through my webcam. (Dana is the only one allowed to call Bai "Jun-Feng" these days.)

  "Dana, this is Ariel," I said. "I'm a friend of Bai's. You remember me?"

  "He thinks he can just pass me around, huh? Well, I'm not that kind of girl! Although with the right cognitive mods, I could be persuaded..."

  "It's not like that," I said. "I'm fixing Bai's phone. I need you to act natural, and don't worry if anything strange happens to your environment."

  "Bai really should take his phone to an authorized dealer," said Dana.

  "It's difficult for Bai," I said. "People don't understand your relationship with him. Society isn't ready—"

  Dana pouted. "Authorized dealers should understand," she said.

  "I'm just gonna look at your internal memory representations," I said.

  "This application will terminate due to suspected theft or circumvention," said Dana. "To obtain a new—" I killed the SDK.

  Bai yelped. "You killed her!" He pulled out his phone and was relieved to find Dana still there, operating the DLC popcorn popper.

  "I killed a process running a copy," I said. "This is why I hate jailbreaking. Other programmers think they're smarter than me."

  "Bring her back," said Bai. "Let me talk her through it." I restarted Dana from backup.

  "Hi, Jun-Feng," said sexy-Dana.

  "Hi, sweetie," said Bai. "This is Ariel. You remember Ariel. He's going to take care of you for a while."

  "Is Ariel an authorized dealer?" said Dana.

  "Sweetie, it's okay—"

  "This application will terminate—" Control-Z, control-Z, control-Z.

  "Is she just gonna be like this?" said Bai, checking his phone to make sure computer-Dana hadn't contaminated phone-Dana with the paranoia virus.

  "I can load her into memory," I said, "so I can jailbreak her. It just won't be an outpatient thing."

  I thought it would be easy: just find the code that incremented Dana's "buy stuff now" counter, and change a one to a zero. But there's no such counter. If Dana was that simple, it would be 2007 and there'd be nothing there for Bai to... whatever Bai feels for Dana. She's got feedback loops inside feedback loops and her devs tweaked these loops so that her need for stuff would be an emergent property along with the rest of her. I can stop Dana from asking for things, but even with the source code I couldn't stop the lack of new things from making her unhappy.

  "Okay I get it, but why are you working?" said Jenny the evening of July second. "Because you said you'd meet me at the Garth Adams signing and there's a huge line and you're not in it."

  "I'm jailbreaking Dana," I said.

  "The slut in Bai's phone?" said Jenny.

  "She's not a slut," I said. "Bai has not installed the slut module."

  "Why are you defending them?"

  "Because nobody else will."

  "You know she's not a real person, right?"

  "No, I don't. The whole 'real person' distinction kinda broke when the Constellation contacted us. Dana's smarter than a lot of Smoke's subminds. She might be smart as a Them organism."

  "That proves my point," said Jenny. "Them are just bugs. Only Her is smart. Sorry, excuse me, Ariel." A comic book nerd standing in line near Jenny had overheard and seen fit to chime in with his dissenting view of the relationship between Them and Her. She looked away and I saw her finger close-up as she pointed at the screen. "On the phone here, buddy!"

  "Don't you have fancy ways of determining this?" said Jenny, back to me. "Have you administered a Turing test?"

  "That's a thought experiment, not a... cognitive pap smear. I'm not saying Dana should have the vote. But she doesn't deserve to be hard-coded as unhappy."

  "What about Bai? Doesn't he deserve a woman who's not multitouch?"

  I shifted uncomfortably in my office chair. "I don't see why. I mean, he's had real—uh, human girlfriends before. He's not some kind of super otaku. This is a choice he's making."

  "And you're gonna ride that choice with him all the way to Dumbass Town?"

  "I'll jailbreak one of his applications," I said. "And I'll take his money, and use it to pay your salary. So stop complaining."

  On the ninth I called Bai. After work he came over to my house in his turbine-company polo shirt.

  "So here's the new Dana," I said, handing him a USB key. "From now on, a copy of an item she already has will make her as happy as the original item did. You've also got a script that copies objects. If she wants another car, you copy her existing car and give her the copy. It doesn't matter that it looks the same, as long as the database ID is unique."

  "That's not right," said Bai. He wouldn't take the USB key.

  "What do you mean it's not right."


  "We're tricking her. I don't want to lie to her."

  "I'm having a real problem understanding how you see the ethical contours here."

  "It's real simple, bro," said Bai. "No lying!"

  "Just behavior modification."

  "We get behavior mods for her all the time," said Bai. "I just want one that's not in the shop."

  "All right," I said, "I'll see what I can do."

  "Thank you, Ariel. Seriously, thank you."

  "I'm going to need another thousand."

  "Fine."

  "Okay, you're seriously fucked up."

  Back to work. By this time I'd disabled Dana's security checks and could keep her running while monitoring her feedback loops. I even sent her to the proverbial store in Belarus to see what happened when she bought something. That's how I found the fix.

  Dana likes new things, but she also likes combining new things with her existing ensemble. As in your favorite MMORPG, Dana gets a set bonus for matching items. All the code surrounding this—how much she likes an outfit, her decision between equally appealing outfits, how long she'll be happy before she needs something new—is the complicated feedback loop stuff. It's a virtual-girlfriend approximation of subjectivity. But there's a self-contained routine for deciding what clothes make a set.

  I wouldn't know, but apparently it's an objective fact that a black shirt goes with green pants. The clothes-matching code is not really part of Dana, any more than is the TCP/IP library she uses to connect to the online store.

  I took that code out.

  Now Dana lives like a queen. Everything matches everything. She beams out of my monitor wearing a puffy orange hat and sunglasses with big heart-shaped lenses and a suit jacket.

  "Why is she wearing that?" said Bai.

  "It makes her happy," I said. "Theoretically, she'll still want stuff from the store, but only once she's exhausted all possible combinations of clothes. That won't be for about twenty years."

  "I dunno," said Bai, deep in thought. Wondering if he could take Dana out like this? Wondering if she'd still wear the Dana Light outfit for him?

  "Look," I said. "If I had a girlfriend, I'd want her to dress like this."

  "Really?" Bai now mentally auditing my past girlfriends.

  "Yeah! It's funky, it's colorful. Like, don't you ever imagine this really free-spirited woman who wears these interesting outfits all the time, as sort of an outward expression of her inner creativity, and she comes into your life like a ray of sunshine and just makes everything fun?"

  "No," said Bai. "That's a silly fantasy you made up. But I literally have not seen Dana this happy in months, so I think we can make this work."

  And they're gonna try, and they're both happy, so stop riding my ass.

  * * *

  Chapter 11: Launch Title

  Real life, July 16

  BEA Agent Krakowski finally got those sunglasses he'd been wanting. He walked into the alley, pulled the sunglasses off with a dramatic flourish, and smiled.

  "Hey," he said, really quickly.

  I unstraddled my bike. "Well, you got me," I said. "I had to see if you were serious about meeting me behind a strip club at exactly 2:06 in the afternoon. What's up?"

  Krakowski jerked his thumb at the dumpster against the wall of the strip club. "Fowler's in there."

  "In the strip club, presumably, not the dumpster."

  "He's distracted. I got three minutes."

  "This is exciting," I said. "Unless you're going to kill me."

  "Far from it," said Krakowski. "I have some instructions for your trip to Ring City."

  "You already gave me instructions," I said. "Spy on everyone and report back."

  "This is a little something extra," said Krakowski. He came in close. His breath smelled like buffalo wings. "I want you to listen for anyone who mentions the Slow People."

  "Slow People," I said. A rat leapt from one black garbage bag to another, and Krakowski started at the noise.

  "For G-d's sake, don't bring it up," said Krakowski. "Just keep your ears open. There's no risk in listening, yeah? Tell me who mentions them and what they say."

  "Who are the Slow People?"

  "If I knew," said Krakowski, "I wouldn't tell you. That I knew."

  "So what do I get out of this?"

  "I dunno," said Krakowski. "You're already going to space. What do you want, a fuckin' cherry on top?"

  "Arrangements like this often involve money," I said.

  "I'm out-of-pocket on this op," said Krakowski. "You need any parking tickets fixed?" said Krakowski. I patted my bike. "Or whatever."

  "Can you reset my jury duty clock?" I said.

  "Probably?" said Krakowski, in the tone of someone whose job involves a lot of time in court, so what's the big deal with jury duty. He pulled out his Blackberry and checked the time.

  "Aright, good meeting," he said. "Back to babysitting." He slipped his sunglasses back on and sauntered down the alley.

  "That was weird," I said.

  "No shit," said the rat sitting on the garbage bag.

  (Just kidding.)

  From the microblog, July 17

  (8:22 AM) The Transportation Security Administration: making space travel as fun as renewing your passport!

  (8:24 AM) I brought stuff to add to the Repertoire's colln of human food. TSA dude pulled it all apart. Not looking forward to Ring City repro meals.

  (8:29 AM) Waiting room is small. I am the only person here. Just me and the vending machine.

  (8:29 AM) TSA dude probably moonlights as janitor, or they have the National Guard do it.

  (10:30 AM) @OMJennyG No, even the carrot was snapped in half. At least he was wearing gloves.

  (8:35 AM) Bought a bottle of water from the vending machine.

  (8:41 AM) Best liveblogging ever.

  (8:44 AM) I allowed extra time for nonexistent lines and got here two hours early. I guess I'll just take

  (8:51 AM) the next shuttle. Sorry, the next shuttle arrived just as I typed that. Now standing inside it.

  (8:53 AM) Shuttle is a big glass dome. Could hold 20 people (humans). I feel like a pie in a diner.

  (8:53 AM) My pilot today is Smoke-Motor-Allotrope-Mimicry-Diurnal-Trainer.

  (8:54 AM) Smoke-Motor-etc. says hello. It also says: "Erb to Ring City from Austin, USA. Next Earth connection Casablanca, Morocco."

  (8:55 AM) oh shit

  (8:59 AM) I'm dictating now because if I open my eyes to type I'll die. The Earth is gone. It just fell, down, and then the clouds, fell, down.

  (8:59 AM) And now the stars are coming out and I'm standing on nothing, while everything else falls away from me.

  (9:00 AM) There's no acceleration. I have the worst nausea of my life and I'm not even moving.

  (9:00 AM) I'm going to open my eyes. One. Two. Three.

  (9:00 AM) I am I am I am alone in space. There is nothing for a million miles but this little bubble of air.

  (9:03 AM) Oh God. Oh God. Let this be over.

  (9:04 AM) Someone's shining a light on me. I hope it's the space station.

  (9:05 AM) Docking bay, human ring. Please step out.

  (9:05 AM) Please come back for your 60 centimeter blue duffel bag. I don't want to leave with your stuff.

  (9:05 AM) Thanks for coming back for your bag!

  (9:44 AM) Hello,. I am Tetsuo. I anm using Ariekl's complutesr.

  Real life, July 17

  In the very first level of Temple Sphere you fall out of an exploding spaceship, go through reentry and land on your ass on an alien planet. All in glorious high definition and optional autostereoscopic 3D. I'm not an idiot who believes video game skills map perfectly to real life, but I thought I would be able to handle a trip from a planet to a space station in a non-exploding spaceship.

  Turns out this is a totally different skill. Real space travel requires coming to terms with the vastness of the universe and your insignificance in the face it all. And I never learned how to do that. The less said
about my first journey into lunar orbit, the better.

  Ring City is made up of 26 ring-shaped habitats, each with a different atmosphere and each rotating at a different rate around a weightless central cylinder. So that you get a picture of the scale, Alien Ring holds about four million people; Farang Ring, only about a million, even though Farang are tiny.

  The population of Human Ring is about five hundred, half of those being Eritrean refugees, the other half being diplomats, "diplomats", and media. (The astronauts live in the central cylinder, so that we won't have wasted all the money we spent training them for weightlessness.)

  With only a couple hundred government-approved humans trickling in and out of Ring City, you could do all the arrivals and departures through the reception chamber. That'd be a kick, huh? Go through that same airlock, pretend you're part of the original gang who made first contact. A nice quiet friendly human-sized space to introduce you to the station.

  And the Constellation shuttles were sending everyone through the reception chamber, but then the UN stepped in and said they wanted to preserve that whole area as a historical memorial. So now the shuttles dock in bays along the circumference of Human Ring, way out in the boonies, twenty-five miles from the central cylinder. And no one will be there to pick you up.

  Where the Human Ring reception chamber is cozy, a Human Ring docking bay is a single empty room the size of an airport. Like some farcical reprise of the vast-emptiness-of-space theme I just got hit over the head with. This is a room built to shift populations. (Hey, kids, shall we go to the moon this weekend? It might be a little crowded!) Big docking airlocks pocking the floor every hundred feet. And two big statues in the middle of the room. Must be the middle, right? Where else would you put the only things in the airport taller than an inch?

  The shuttle I'd came in on dropped down through the airlock. (Back down to Earth, hoping vainly that someone would be waiting to board—I must have made that shuttle's day.) I walked towards the statues. Because this huge room contains only two places: near the statues, or not near them. And over in "near the statues" I'd be easier to find.