"Great. I don't even rate a vintage Mutant's Revenge kids' suitcase." The blue plastic tub was clearly modeled after the Shur-plast design I used when I had a house, but instead of "SHUR-PLAST" stamped into the lid, I saw the starfield logo of the apparently-no-longer-defunct Constellation Shipping overlay. The logo I'd seen on a shipping container in Utility Ring back in July.
I pulled the top off the plastic tub. Inside were stacks of notebooks.
"Ahh—"
"Y'okay?"
I pulled a notebook off the top of the stack and opened it. It was full of notes, as notebooks will be. Data structures, engineering ethics, genetic drift, doodles, unrequited-love poetry. All of it in my handwriting.
"These are my notebooks, from college. I lost them... in the fire."
"Hey, yeah, I remember those," said Bai.
"How did Curic get these?" The notebooks weren't worn at all, like they were reprints, or...
"Probably that time she scanned everything in your house?" said Bai.
"Can she recreate the other things, like my Playstations? Bai, my stuff isn't gone!"
"Ask Tetsuo," said Bai. "I need to go check the oven." He shut the door quietly.
I cleared some purses off the bed—Tetsuo's bed—and sat there, finishing my pile o' sushi and flipping through brand-new copies of my eight-year-old notebooks. Guest-star doodles from younger Bai. Lots of Jenny. Sometimes she drew the first panel of a comic strip and I'd continue it with stick figures. I opened Jenny's note and smoothed it out beneath one of those comic strips.
You are very high. Do not panic.
Jenny
I heard people clapping and slipped back into the living room. Bai was saying: "—seven hundred degrees in an overclocked oven," wearing silicone gloves and cutting up a folio-sized piece of smart paper.
After some mistaken identity I was able to locate Jenny. "What's going on?" I asked her.
"Tetsuo brought down some nanotech molds that make smart paper," she said. "You make it in the oven from playground sand. It's the door prize."
The oven? I thought. Is this the fucking Peace Corps? Is the Constellation gonna give us little straws to purify our drinking water? I did not say this out loud because I knew Jenny would interpret it as panicking.
"All right, bros!" said Bai. "We got eight new pieces. Anyone wants to adjourn to the study, I'll show you how to flash an OS onto the hardware."
There was a small exodus which included one of the gamers on Bai's couch. I took the empty spot, next to one of Bai's friends I've never met, and picked up a still-warm controller.
"You play?" said Bai's friend.
"Man, I worked on the prequel to this game," I said. No response. "Yes, I play."
Bai's friend sniffed the air around me. "Wow," he said. He was wearing—no kidding—a backwards baseball cap.
The deathmatch was my favorite Temple Sphere multiplayer map, the Tool of Justice munitions factory. I spawned onto a conveyor belt, atop a pile of dark matter destined to be turned into weapons. In the munitions factory, everyone spawns onto a conveyor belt. My strategy is to keep moving and trade up weapons as I go. I jumped down a level to pick up some shatter grenades from an active fabricator.
"Did you hear they cancelled Temple Sphere 2?" said dude. I had not heard this. I didn't bother to respond because I knew people like him will just talk over you.
"They're doing a new IP. All the maps are on Ring City." I tossed a grenade at a crate of small arms and picked a functioning needler out of the wreckage. "All the different Rings. Should be suh-weeeet."
I pictured space marines lurching in battle armor through the identical motel corridors of Human Ring. I pictured the people controlling those marines, people like dude on my left.
"I guess Alien Ring would make a good map," I said. I lifted the needler and plinked another player off his conveyor and into a fabricator. The fabricator made a gulp and squeezed out three-quarters of a heavy artillery piece.
"Sniper fag!" said dude. Hah!
"The whole map is on conveyors," I said. "In that context, I don't think it's fair to disparage precision shooting."
"Cocknobbler!" he suggested. Holy shit, I thought. It's that guy. "Do you play a lot of online?" I asked.
"I prefer it," said dude. "At least you can't smell the THC coming off the stoned sniper fags."
"This is for therapeutic purposes," I said. "I'm perfectly lucid." It was around this time that I fell asleep.
Real life, September 14, early morning
I woke in darkness. Before me, through vastness of space, I saw a thick crescent of light. A planet, dark green at the equator and browner towards the poles; a planet rotating in front of me, the terminator sweeping west to reveal more green and brown and the white of an enormous storm system as I lay in geosynchronous orbit. I let out a strangled scream.
"Beeee quiiiiiet!" hissed Tetsuo Milk. "Humans are sleeping."
"I'm a human," I croaked.
Tetsuo crawled around noisily and turned on a table lamp. I was in Bai's guest room—Tetsuo's bedroom. The bags and purses were gone from the bed, and I was lying there instead. Tetsuo held open a Gideon Bible in one forehand and a Hunter S. Thompson anthology in the other. The planet on the wall was an animated poster.
"Why did you hang up that terrifying poster?"
"It depicts where I was born," said Tetsuo. "I like to look at it."
"It's Down? The Alien homeworld?"
"We altered a planet with no history," said Tetsuo. "Let's go outside if we talk."
I was still wearing my shoes. We snuck through the living room, where a couple die-hard gamers were slumped asleep on the couch. The split-screen deathmatch was still going on: four space marines standing on conveyer belts, weapons at the ready, endlessly touring the Tool of Justice munitions factory. Every ninety seconds being dropped into fabricators, dying, and respawning.
We sat on lawn chairs on the patio and looked up at the stars. Well, I sat on a lawn chair; Tetsuo lay on the ground. "Where's your home planet up there?" I asked.
"I read that it's in the Cygnus constellation," said Tetsuo, "but I've never seen a cygnus and I can't tell the one bunch of stars from the other."
"Let me download a planetarium app," I said. "It'll show the constellations." I took out my brand-new phone and sent seventy cents to some struggling developer.
Tetsuo stopped looking at the sky and slapped his flank with his tail. "You said that you burned down your house," he said.
"Yes. Burned down. Totally accidental."
"You tried to attach a Cheb Complete Entertainment Device to the domestic alternating current."
"Totally not thinking properly."
"That's the name of the computer system in Schvei," said Tetsuo. "The computer that caught fire if you installed the memory container incorrectly. It was a fictional device."
"Yeah, well, someone built one," I said. "Obviously it was their idea of a sick joke."
"Yes," said Tetsuo. "Obviously."
"I got the notebooks," I said. "Thank you. I thought they were gone."
"They are indeed gone," said Tetsuo. "Curic gave you some soft-dolls to compensate. I can only apologize for the paper quality." He meant the lack of wear on the replicas.
"I made the mistake of reading through one of those notebooks," I said. "There's some really personal stuff in there. Mostly about girls I wanted to have sex with. I don't want that stuff in the Constellation's collective memory for the next billion years."
When Tetsuo responded, it was to say: "Do you remember Dieue the Four-Fisted?"
"I think I'd remember someone with that name."
"We met him not. He was an Ip Shkoy Alien. I recreated his house in July, as an immersive environment for Ip Shkoy games."
"The place with no light."
"I lack an English for this so I will say that Dieue was a 'fall guy.' Someone who cannot gain sexual achievement in normal planetary gravity. I mean, only in free-fall."
"I've
had sex in free-fall," I said. You can't be too blunt with Tetsuo. "It's not worth it. The only position is the 'We Finally Got It To Work'."
"If you're a fall guy," said Tetsuo, "it's the only way to go. Dieue's apartment was stocked with appropriate films. Which doesn't make sense, now that I think it. Maybe watching the films was enough for him."
"Yeah, well, the Ip Shkoy were sex maniacs."
"By human standards, I suppose," said Tetsuo, "although I'm beginning to doubt it. But maniacs they were with strict rules about what sex is appropriate. By standards of the Ip Shkoy, Dieue's preferences were mild- to medium-sized obscene.
"But hey, nobody cares. The scans were encrypted while Dieue was alive, and now he's dead for seventeen million years. His whole civilization was dead, until we brought it back to play some games in his apartment. Now it doesn't matter what sex he liked."
"So, you won't un-scan my notebooks," I said.
"That is the last thing you want," said Tetsuo. "You would only call attention to them. And perhaps your house will burn down again." He gave me a look like he considered this a real possibility. "Then where will you be?"
"Okay," I said, "planetarium is installed." I stood on my lawn chair to turn off the porch light, then walked into the yard and held the phone to the sky to take a reading. "With my luck, Cygnus will be in the southern hemisphere."
Tetsuo didn't move off the porch. "No, here it is," I said. "Just a cross shape. They should have called it the Pterodactyl."
"Do you know what those stars look like from the other side?" said Tetsuo.
"What?"
"Nothing," said Tetsuo. "Same as this side. Stars have sentimental value only."
"What about the name of your civilization? What about the star-draw?"
"Which the star-what?"
I sat back down. "The ritual," I said, "where everyone has a coin or a rock or something, and you toss them all together to make a constellation. You and I did it with M&Ms."
"Oh," said Tetsuo. "Someone came up with that in June. I don't understand the appeal."
"Tets, you need to understand this," I said. "Humans dream about the stars. They've been taunting us ever since we learned to look up. Brilliant people spent their whole lives trying to figure out why they move. Humans got burned at the stake for saying that stars are stars."
"Aliens, same," said Tetsuo. "Then we went up there and found there's nothing. Nothing but algae, and fossils, and Slow People."
Wait a minute. I leaned out of my porch chair. "You know about the Slow People?"
"I know some about," said Tetsuo. "I'll talk about them in a lecture at the university. Maybe half a lecture."
"Who are they?"
"Little computer people," said Tetsuo, like he couldn't believe I found this interesting. "Like Dana Light the soft-doll girlfriend, but advanced, and faster. Big societies living on little pieces of matter in interstellar space, or next to stars."
"This might be a stupid question," I said.
"Maybe," said Tetsuo generously, "maybe not."
"They're faster than human computers?"
"Dozen-hundreds faster."
"Why are they called Slow People?"
"Because when you talk to them, all they do is complain about how slow you are. It's a piss. Therefore we don't talk to them often."
"Krakowski," I said, "the guy from the BEA who—well, you know Krakowski."
"I know him."
"He wants me to tell him if anyone mentions Slow People. Like, call him immediately."
"Did he tell why he cares?"
"Probably so he can dish it to his superiors and score a promotion."
"Why do his superiors care?"
"I don't know."
"I have a suppose," said Tetsuo. "They think they'll establish a new contact with the Slow People. Then they can threaten to fight us in a war." He laughed and laughed at this—it sounded like someone choking to death. "Humans and Slow People on one side, the Constellation on the other."
I shuddered. "Do the Slow People hate the Constellation?"
"The Slow People are the Constellation," said Tetsuo. "There's a billion Slow People for everybody who looks like me, or you, or Bob the Mzungu. We're only the skin of the mushroom."
"Then where are they? I don't see any Slow People on the contact mission. Unless Smoke qualifies."
"Why should they come? Travel is too slow, and you are too slow when they arrive. If Slow People want to meet space monsters, they can evolve a whole society of them in an afternoon. You and I are uninteresting to them. We only protect them and maintain their hardware."
"Protect them," I said. "Protect them from what?"
"You tell Krakowski," said Tetsuo. He thought about this for a moment. "Perhaps knowing this is his desire. You tell him that we protect the Slow People from Ragtime. That's the code name your bosses use. Your government."
"What's Ragtime?"
"The other thing there is, in space," said Tetsuo. "I forgot to mention it before; it's more like a star than a fossil. Yes, tell Krakowski that we protect the Slow People from Ragtime. Be sure to use their code name. It'll outcreep him."
"You're outcreeping me. Tell me what is Ragtime."
"Ragtime is a scavenger," said Tetsuo. "A negentropictropic matter cloud. It's hundred-percent harmless, it only eats dead things. Just, sometimes it needs some help knowing what's dead and what's Slow People. Tell him we gave it Gliese 777Ad."
"What are you saying?"
"I am saying to tell Krakowski this and watch him squirm."
And that's what I told Krakowski, over video chat. "He said to watch you squirm," I said.
"Oh, they want to make us squirm, all right," said Krakowski.
"Can you squirm just a little?"
"First they tried to scare us about global warming. Then it was the Antarctica thing. Now, if we don't shape up, civilization will collapse and Ragtime will get us. It's childish."
"Can you give me some more about Ragtime? Tetsuo just told me what to tell you."
"I bet he did." Krakowski's expression looked like he was imagining painful deaths for me and Tetsuo.
"You said there was something in this for me," I said. "I just want—"
"Yeah, get me real information," said Krakowski. "Nothing from Tetsuo Milk, for Christ's sake. He's yanking my chain. He thinks this is funny."
Chapter 25: The Infiltration Path
Real life, September 14, early morning
"Tets, I'm worried about Curic." This was another thing that happened on Bai's porch, after I fell asleep at the party.
"You worry a whole lot," said Tetsuo. "As much as two or three median humans."
"You remember when she brought me up to the space station, and it turned out she was working with Plan C?"
"That did happen," Tetsuo allowed.
"Well, she didn't switch at the last minute," I said. "Half of her was working with Plan C the whole time. And you and me, she only showed us the other half, the half that agreed with us. She's got ambivalence."
"Yes, I see. That is sense."
"That is schizophrenia! So I'm worried!" I got out of the chair and paced. "Dana says it can be caused by blunt force trauma or a brain tumor. Do you want Curic to have a fucking brain tumor that's not being looked at?"
"It's not a tumor," said Tetsuo. "Dana knows nothing of modern Farang psychology. She is based—"
"Yes, yes, an Alien psychology. This is becoming more painfully obvious with each hour I spend with her. Tets, Dana is coming on to me."
That got Tetsuo's attention. He looked up at me in the Alien version of confusion. "I misunderstand. She's crawling over you?"
"Practically! She wants us to have weird virtual sex, because that's what Aliens do: have sex with the people they work with. She thinks I can talk to Bai and work out some kind of Dana-sharing arrangement."
"Transitive pair bonding is common."
"Not in humans! And Curic's going to die, Tets. Her personalities will beco
me dissociated and she'll die. Why aren't you worried?"
"I save my worry for when people will actually die." Tetsuo rubbed a hindhand against the brick of the patio. "In the Dhihe Coastal Coalition, in the time that Dana knows about, Curic would for sure die. Her clan-mates would burn her at stakes to enforce social norms.
"Fortunately, she lives ninety million years later in the Constellation, and we enforce social norms with mostly sarcasm. There's no problem with being ambivalent. The worst you will look silly, or build ugly buildings."
"Half of her is working against the other half! She is literally of two minds!"
"She is two people, Ariel!" For the first time, Tetsuo was pissed off. He was trapped on a backwater planet full of hicks ranting about how G-d would judge all forms of life in the universe by humanity's standards.
I said nothing.
"You can be friends with your crossself and disagree with him," said Tetsuo.
"I'm just trying to understand that," I said.
"You already understand it," said Tetsuo, still without patience. "We understand both, to be against a part of our larger self. My wife Ashley doesn't want to be here at all. She worked for Plan C, and I would not."
Tetsuo's voice softened a little. "It would be better if we agreed," he said, "but we still have love."
Text chat, September 14
ABlum: hey, nice party last night
* * *
KThxBai: oh man, we're still cleaning up.
tets decided to build a forge in the kitchen and recycle the bottles into smart paper.
* * *
ABlum: so, i was wondering if you or your wikipedia pals have the lowdown on negentropictropic matter clouds
you may also know them as "ragtime"
* * *
KThxBai: let me check.
there are eight lowdowns on ragtime, and they all contradict each other.
it may not even exist.
personally, I don't yet consider it notable.
Blog post, September 15
Constellation Games Page 25