Constellation Games

by Leonard Richardson

  "Bite me." I hung up.

  I pretended to dial Jenny's phone, jabbing at the screen like a baby imitating his parents. "Yeah, I just got a G-ddamn fascist calling me, nosing around about the Slow People. He was really interested in them. Yeah, big time. What's that? You're going to fuck him up sideways with a fence post for his curiosity? That's a little extreme, don't you think? Don't you think that sort of thing should be reserved for PEOPLE WHO—"

  "Don't yell!" said Jenny. "You're scaring my phone pet." She grabbed her phone from me.

  "You have a phone pet?" I said. "You made fun of Bai for a year because of Dana Light, and all this time you've had a phone pet?"

  "It's a pet!" said Jenny. "I don't masturbate to it."

  "Uh-huh."

  "And it's just as smart as a real goldfish." Jenny patted her phone's screen. "There, there," she murmured. "Mama'll take care of you, even though her job fell through and her flaky employer probably won't pay her."

  "Your employer is sitting right here," I pointed out.

  "Yes, indeed," said Jenny. I moved my legs and she sat down next to me. "On my couch, where he lives. Because he burned his house down."

  "We're backed up. I lost, like, ten hours of work. It's not like the video game factory exploded. Sayable Spice is still happening."

  Jenny patted my foot. "Ariel, you do not make good decisions under pressure. You freeze up and spend two years in a shit job, or you get impulsive and end up burning your house down. I do not see a ghostwritten corporate biography in your future."

  "Do you want to make the business decisions? Because I'm fine—"

  "No," said Jenny. "That's boring."

  "You're just as bad at it as me," I said.

  "Don't want to," said Jenny, like this distinction was crucial to her identity. "You can't do two jobs at once when you just lost your home. We need a frontman. Someone to set the release schedule and bullshit the publishers."

  "What's wrong with the schedule I already set? We're like a week from a playable demo."

  "Tough-looking guy would be good," said Jenny. "Ask your space cougar to recommend an ex-astronaut who wants some part-time. They're good at talking and filling out paperwork."

  "Excuse me? Did you just call Tammy a...?"

  "Rrrawr. You heard me." Jenny pawed the air in a way I guess she thought was sexy.

  "Don't call her a... that word. Nobody even uses that word anymore."

  "She's a hottie. Robbin' the cradle."

  "I'm almost thirty," I said.

  "They make cradles in all sizes," said Jenny.

  * * *

  The next morning I called Bai from my office, which is also Jenny's couch, and Bai patched me through to Dana.

  "Thanks for coming in," I said.

  "I didn't come in," said Dana. "It's video chat."

  "Yeah, well."

  "Are you going to fire me?" said Dana.

  "No," I said, "why would I... do that?"

  "Obviously," said Dana. "You lost the Brain Embryo in the 'fire.' There's nothing for me to translate. You'll either cancel the entire project, or go forward with your current knowledge of the Dhihe Coastal Coalition. Either way, you don't need me."

  "Is that why you're in your pajamas?" I said. "Because you thought you wouldn't be working today?"

  "This is a chemise," said Dana.

  "It has unlicensed cartoon characters all over it."

  "So what?"

  "I'm not laying you off," I said, "but there is no more translation work, and Jenny has called a vote of no confidence in me."

  "Does it really work that way?"

  "Apparently it does in this company. We need to get some money coming in so that I can buy a replacement house, and possibly clothes. If you can take up the PR, the money stuff, talking to publishers, all the stuff that's not coding or art, I can focus on development, we can hook a little investment capital, and I won't have to lay you off."

  "You know I'm not really human, right?" said Dana. "I don't know how that stuff works in your culture."

  "It's easy," I said. "You just crunch numbers and write emails. You can almost do it with a computer program. We only need a warm body to file paperwork. In fact there was an intelligent agent for running your business, about a year ago."

  "Why don't you use that?" said Dana. "It would be cheaper."

  "It was a trojan," I said. "Six months ago, it transferred everybody's assets to a holding company in the Cayman Islands."

  "I accept the position," said Dana. "My first recommendation is to cancel the Sayable Spice project, fire everybody, and shut down the business."

  "No, when you tell a joke, it's supposed to have some setup first."

  "I crunched the numbers," said Dana. "The most likely outcome of this project is that you'll lose five to twenty thousand dollars. I'm sure it originally made sense to take that risk when you had a house, but it's time to reconsider. Your expected value is negative."

  "Expected value is irrelevant," I said. "This is art. This is about introducing humanity to Constellation culture."

  "Take the art and the culture to a game studio," said Dana. "They'll take the monetary hit and you'll get a salary out of it."

  "I've had it with idiot studios," I said. "I've been working for other people my whole life, and all they do is ignore my ideas. That's if I'm lucky. If I'm not lucky, they ruin my ideas and then make me implement the ruined versions."

  "All right," she said. "Since you are attached to the continued existence of your corporation, I have a backup plan. You don't need a full-time artist. Fire Jenny—"

  "I'm not going to fire my best friend!"

  "—and contract with her for a flat fee for every subsequent art asset."

  "That's obscene, and she's also doing the music."

  "She's not a professional musician. Get some Creative Commons techno from the web. Give the artist a hundred bucks if it'll make you feel better."

  "We need to clarify something," I said. "When I offered you this position, it was not an invitation to be the fucking Cayman Islands computer program. Stop looking at this as an optimization problem."

  "It is an optimization problem," said Dana. "This is the logic of business."

  "It's the logic of shitty business," I said. "It's the logic of me quitting every job I ever had. Crispy Duck is going to be different."

  "Cut everyone's salary in half," said Dana. "That's my final offer."

  "How 'bout I cut your salary in half!"

  "I don't have a salary," said Dana. "I'm already part-time hourly. Good decision, by the way."

  Jenny poked her head into the living room. "Silence!" she said. "I am working! In my house! Silence!"

  "Dana wants me to fire you!"

  "I am drawing an anthropomorphic cabbage," said Jenny. She put her finger to her lips. "Sssh. Or get out. And no firing me." She held out her hand like she was showing off an engagement ring. "You see this hand? It is a very special hand. It is the proverbial 'hand that feeds.' No bitey."

  "Dana," I said, "can I delegate to you the parts of this job that don't involve ruining peoples' lives? I think we've seen enough of that this week."

  Dana shrugged. "It's your money."

  "Thank you," said Jenny. "Now. Ariel: Tetsuo is moving to Earth. He got a Greenland Treaty visa and a job at the U. He's staying with Bai."

  "How do you know this?" I said.

  "Bai informed me," said Jenny, "using the Internet. I thought you might like to know."

  "Why's he staying with Bai?"

  "Because thanks to the magic of paperwork, Bai has become Tetsuo's sponsor."

  "I should be his sponsor!" I said.

  "Really? Where's he going to live? In the ashes of your house?"

  "It's fucking Agent Fowler. He's doing this to spite me. He and Bai are frat brothers."

  Jenny leaned her cheek against the doorframe. "Ariel, you don't have a house. It's okay to be angry about that, but you need to be angry about the actual loss of your ho
use, and not random unrelated shit."

  "Fuck off, Counselor Troi."

  Jenny disentangled herself from the doorframe. "Oh, that is the absolute chicken-fried limit," she said.

  "I'm sorry," I said immediately. "It's just..." I decided not to go with my planned defense: "you were being really annoying."

  "Get out," said Jenny. "Go to a coffee shop or someplace where they'll put up with your 'what character are you' online-quiz shit. Counselor Troi, my ass."

  "I can't live in a coffee shop."

  "You can come back after dark. Out!"

  Blog post, September 3

  [This post is friends locked.]

  I really lost my temper, I yelled at Jenny and she kicked me out of her house. That was eleven-thirty in the morning. I'll hit "post" on this just before ten PM. They're closing up the coffee shop. I haven't gone back because I've been working on hammering the Sayable Spice demo into something that could be considered "playable." No 16-bit game parodies and no melancholy playable flashbacks. Just a nice item-collection action RPG about assembling chemicals into flavors.

  I could go back. She said I could come back after dark, and it's very very dark. I haven't gone back because I'm ashamed of what I did. I snapped at Jenny not because my house burned down, but because one little additional thing didn't go my way. I don't feel like I can trust myself anymore.

  I'm taking solace in software, trying to make a version of Sayable Spice that's good enough to solve all our problems. This didn't work for Clan Interference, it didn't work for the Yaiskek Corporation, and it won't work for me. In the end, all we have is our overlay affiliations. Little patches with starfields on them. Little dots of light in the infinite darkness of space.

  Crispy Duck Games: YOUR LOVABLE QUIRKY INDIE STUDIO

  * * *

  Chapter 24: Homebrew

  Private text chat, September 13

  ABlum: ok here it is

  * PRESS RELEASE * FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION * PRESS RELEASE *

  CRISPY DUCK SOFTWARE RELEASES PLAYABLE DEMO OF "CONSTELLATION GAME" TO INDIFFERENT PUBLIC

  HASTILY WRITTEN PRESS RELEASE ADDS VENEER OF RESPECTABILITY

  Attention, people of Earth! Extraterrestrials walk among us! There may be one in your hometown, cataloguing flowers, scanning your art museum, or studying the dusty books in the back of your underfunded local library!

  It's time to fight back! Time to learn about extraterrestrial culture before they learn about ours! Crispy Duck Games has the perfect solution: Sayable Spice: Earth Remix, available now for your Unix-compatible mobile device.

  In Sayable Spice: Earth Remix, a fully localized remake of the classic Farang computer game, you'll build up flavors and scents to unlock memories of the past. You'll experience mind-twisting puzzles and non-stop action that thrilled audiences ninety million years ago (except for the parts we left out because they were weird or depressing). As you play, you'll gain a deeper understanding of our new extraterrestrial allies (except we took most of that stuff out).

  "Sayable Spice is the project I've been wanting to work on my entire life." said studio head Ariel Blum from his luxurious fortress made from Jenny's couch cushions. "I remember being a little kid and thinking 'I wish space aliens would contact Earth so that I could do remakes of their video games.' I'm so excited about this fucking game that I haven't slept in forty-eight hours."

  With the playable demo of Sayable Spice: Earth Remix, you'll be ready for the next phase in humanity's evolution. Available at any third-party repository for free download, you fucking chiselers. (iOS users allow six to eight weeks for App Store approval.)

  DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick: I see a number of obvious changes, but they look easy to make.

  * * *

  ABlum: fix it, send it out

  * * *

  DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick: Done.

  * * *

  ABlum: that took like five seconds

  * * *

  DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick: You are complaining?

  Wait! Did you even do an iOS version?

  * * *

  ABlum: no

  ask zhenya if he wants to contract for that

  Real life, September 13

  "Are you going to be okay?" said Jenny.

  "I can party all night," I said. "It's like ten in the morning for me."

  "It better be friggin four-twenty a.m.," said Jenny. "You smoked all my Lone Star Diesel."

  "It's a business expense," I said. "It cancels out the caffeine without making me crash."

  "This it?" said the cab driver.

  "Yes," said Jenny. "The one with the huge party going on. Thank you."

  I got out of the cab and stared into the light from the house. My pupils lens-flared. Shadows of people clustered on the porch in a cloud of smoke.

  "Is this Bai's house?" I said.

  Jenny pushed me up the walk. "He's having a party."

  "I can see it's a party. I'm not—" Clomp, clomp up the steps. Someone with a strange accent was saying: "Actually it's inside my body, so if it gets stolen I'm probably dead already."

  I blinked in the smoke. A flash of light glazed the front windows of the house, silhouetting a huge, misshapen figure in the doorway.

  "Yo, Ariel!" said Tetsuo Milk.

  "Jesus Christ the great moral teacher!" I screeched. Tetsuo loomed in the doorway, the focus of everyone's attention, wearing loose Alien clothing and holding Bai's coffee cup with the biohazard symbol on it.

  From inside the house I heard a grenade go off. Someone was playing a shooter—either Temple Sphere or one of the other Reflex games. They reuse the explosions because they think their sound assets are the fucking Wilhelm Scream, a hilarious in-joke.

  "Hello, Tetsuo," said Jenny. "It's good to finally meet you. Ariel, this is Tetsuo's welcome-to-Earth party," she told me. "I told you about it approximately one dozen times."

  "I think every time you reminded me, I just wrote it down in a code comment."

  "Ah, and the lovely Jenny," said Tetsuo, pinching her hand carefully in what I guess was a suave gesture. "I didn't know you had a private car and driver!"

  "That was a taxi," said Jenny.

  "That explains why it was so ugly," said Tetsuo. "I wasn't going to say anything. Nevertheless, Bai Lifang asks me to welcome you into his home. There is sushi, potato chips, and beer inside on your left. The beer is in a box full of ice so that it will stay cold."

  I noticed that Tetsuo's coffee cup was full of sushi rolls. "Can I just grab one from you?" I said. "I'm starving."

  "Don't," said Tetsuo. "They're full of wasabi horseradish."

  I picked up a piece. Yup, solid wasabi, packed in where the fish should be. I dropped the sushi back in the coffee cup. "You can eat that?"

  "I like condiments," said Tetsuo.

  "So, Tetsuo," said Jenny. "Why Austin?"

  "I have friends here," said Tetsuo, "and it never gets too cold. It was also easy to obtain an employment at your alma mater."

  "Did they con you into working the computer lab?" I said. "Because that's the worst job—"

  "I am a lecturer," said Tetsuo with what might have been disdain. "I had a long conversation about the Ip Shkoy with some other lecturers, whichafter they gave me a teaching credential." Tetsuo took a crumpled piece of paper out of his jacket and pulled it open like a centerfold. I recognized it immediately. Jenny has a nearly identical piece of paper. I did, too, until the fucking BEA stole it.

  "That's a diploma," Jenny said. "They gave you a Ph.D."

  "Yes, that's what they called it," said Tetsuo.

  "'Cultural Studies'," read Jenny. "You should have held out for History."

  "Need food," I said. I pushed past Tetsuo into the house and filled a paper plate with the remains of the party's sushi. There was a game in progress: four-player split-screen deathmatch projected onto Bai's wall. The game was indeed Temple Sphere, Reflex's sci-fi first-person shooter taking place a future with evil extraterrestrial birds and wi
thout safety railings.

  The living room was crowded with people I didn't know. Jenny was still outside talking to Tetsuo. In this situation, I usually squeeze up against a wall, but the walls were occupied. A good ten people were at the edges, out of the action, huddled over little pieces of paper. Smart paper.

  Oh shit. Smart paper had launched and I'd missed it. I'd been heads-down coding and the platforms I'd been coding to had become obsolete. Drunk douchebags in polo shirts now had access to extraterrestrial computers. There were probably already a dozen factory towns in China churning it out for multinational OEMs.

  There was something I was supposed to do in this kind of situation. Jenny had handed me a note in the car. I filled my mouth with sushi, took the note out of my pocket and read it.

  You are very high. Do not panic.

  Jenny

  I practiced not panicking. The sushi helped. Bai himself stepped out of the kitchen, wearing a respirator and an apron, slapping white dust off his arms. Of all the people in the crowd, he pointed at me and slid over.

  "Bro," he said.

  "Yeah!" I said, apparently.

  "You me guest room," said Bai. His polo shirt was soaked with sweat. He walked into a hallway and I followed him.

  The bed in the guest room was piled high with guests' bags and purses. Stacked against the wall were a dozen wood-and-leather steamer trunks, each plastered with ancient shipping labels.

  I didn't recognize the trunks. "Are these Tetsuo's?"

  "Historical recreations," said Bai.

  I looked closer. The shipping labels weren't ancient; they said "Constellation Shipping." I looked at Bai. "Was Tetsuo a member of Constellation Shipping?" I asked.

  "Curic built the trunks," said Bai. "Tetsuo just packed them." Bai pointed to a blue plastic tub, cowering on the floor before the steamer trunks. "That's yours, also from Curic. Tetsuo asked me to make sure you picked it up."