Constellation Games

by Leonard Richardson

  "Don't call me again."

  Blog post, October 17

  [This post is friends locked.]

  GameFUQs Presents: Mission To Mars!

  a walkthrough by Ariel Blum

  Get a spacesuit.

  Wear the spacesuit.

  Take the zipline to Gaijin Ring.

  Walk through the port onto Mars.

  FUCK

  FUCK

  She's gone

  and I'm left

  with nothing.

  Real life, October 17

  In Alien Ring there are cma, organisms we'd call trees, miles high. The Aliens have carved niches in the trunks and built their houses inside the cma. One of these houses is the house Tetsuo left for the guest room in Bai's duplex, and for half a tiny office at UT Austin.

  The door's not locked because there isn't any lock. It's a two-room house. The first room has furniture: a mattress embedded in the floor, and some monkeybars. From the second room, I heard one Alien speaking with another in Purchtrin.

  "Hello!" I called every five feet, uncomfortable in someone else's house, shuffling slowly towards the second room. There was no interior door. Somn (a.k.a. Ashley Somn, Tetsuo's wife) sat on her hindarms on another embedded mattress, leaning forward, facing me, her hand poised over a large sheet of smart paper. A human computer. Yes, I now think of smart paper as "a human computer."

  "Heeeeeee... bllo," said Ashley/Somn in English, her thin black tongue sliding around the word. Then she switched to subvocalization and took on the synthesized voice of B-list comedian/actress Padma Dhanjan.

  "Ariel!" she said. "Tetsuo said you might come here."

  "He gave me your address," I said. "I tricked him; he thought it was for charades. I live here now."

  "Welcome!" said Somn. "Welcome to. Well, you don't live in Alien Ring because of the nitrous oxide. Welcome to our little artificial planetary system."

  "Are those eggs?" Somn was straddling three large football-shaped things.

  "They're my eggs," she said, and cuddled them. "I thought you knew that Tetsuo and I..."

  "I guess I thought they'd be in incubators," I said.

  "No, they're perfectly healthy, thank goodness."

  "When do they...?"

  "In nine weeks."

  "I heard you talking to someone. Were you..."

  "Oh, yes. I'm talking to Daisy Cept." Somn gestured at her smart paper. "She's Tetsuo's mistress; you remember her."

  "You really need to stop running relationship words through the translator," I said. On the paper I saw Outernet video of naked Farang and spacesuited Aliens and Goyim, all swimming gracefully through murky water.

  "Daisy is working with the Raw Materials overlay," said Somn. "We're removing a garbage patch from the Pacific Ocean. We get to keep the plastic."

  "I thought Daisy worked with dolphins," I said. I sat down against the wall.

  "The dolphins are helping," said Somn. She wiggled her fingers at her paper; one of the Aliens waved back with a hindhand.

  "Are you okay with this? Staying here with the eggs while Tetsuo and Daisy...?"

  "I miss Tetsuo," she said. "I do, I do. But I couldn't go to Earth. All that horror. Murder and torture."

  "It's really not that bad," I said. "You know we got fossils there, right?"

  "Yes," said Somn, "in Guizhou, and Montana." Like the two places were equally bad. "Ariel, I have these thoughts. I stop myself. But I have thoughts for a moment. What if you simply hadn't been here? If we'd arrived two million years earlier. It would have only been the dolphins and the chimpanzees. It would have been easier. I'm sorry. I know it's horrible."

  This, I felt, was a terrific time to exploit Somn's guilt. "I need some help," I said.

  "Yes, of course. Anything."

  "I brought some stuff for the repertoire. Scotch alcohol, delicacies from Earth. Uh, I don't know if the repertoire can copy living things, but plant seeds."

  "Seeds are fine," said Somn. "We'll clone them. Thank you. You didn't have to do this." She looked around, like, where are the seeds?

  "Thing is, I brought all this stuff as payment," I said.

  "Payment?" Somn wrinkled her mouth. "Are you being blackmailed?"

  "I want to make something from the repertoire; something really big."

  "How big?" said Somn. She seemed to see no connection between the last two things I'd said.

  "As big as a house."

  "What is it?"

  "It's a house," I said. "It's my house. The way it was before the feds tore it up. Curic scanned it in July; I came here to get it back."

  "Let's enjoy doing it," Somn's translator chirped. "I'll ask my mistress Esteban to watch my eggs."

  "That is absolutely the wrong word."

  "Ariel, do you know how to use a matter shifter?"

  "Can't say I do," I said.

  "There will never be a better time to learn."

  In Human Ring, there are hallways and there are apartments. The hallway you'd design if your idea of space travel came from human sci-fi TV shows. The apartment you'd design if you had to build a refugee camp for humans without ever having met any.

  There's also an Eritrean sector, with open space and a soccer field, and now there's also an American house. It's my house. Somn and I built it from Curic's scans. It's got an upstairs and a downstairs, furniture, food in the cupboards, and fake sunlight for me to close the drapes on. Eventually it will have a backyard with replica dirt, and I'll plant a cherry tree in the dirt. The materials are not quite right, but it's more like my house than anything else in the universe.

  It took eight hours and at the end I was exhausted, even though I hadn't done much but scamper around listening to Somn explain the matter shifter. After a final inspection of the interior, I lay dead on my couch as Somn called Esteban to reclaim her eggs.

  "Wait, don't go yet," I mumbled. "I forgot to give you something. It's in the side pocket of the duffel bag. Can you get it? I don't want to move for about three days. Not the backpack, the blue bag."

  Somn crawled to the duffel and took out a little cardboard box. She dropped to her hindarms to open the box, and took out a wad of cotton padding and a fossil trilobite.

  "Oh, Elrathia kingi," she said. "I'm sorry, Ariel, but this variety is quite well studied."

  "It's for you," I said. "A gift. I got it at the rock shop in Austin. I thought you might like to have a real fossil from Earth."

  Somn sat back on her hindhands in my living room for a long time. Long enough, I guess, to look up the proper etiquette over her neural computer link.

  "Thank you," she finally said. She stood upright and thumped a forearm against her chest, right where the heart would be on a human. "Thank you very much, Ariel." She took the fossil and left the box. And I didn't get off the couch for a long, long time.

  * * *

  Hours later, still on the replica of my comfortable couch, talking to Tetsuo over the Outernet.

  "I spoke with our mutual friend Krakowski," he said.

  "I hope you're being sarcastic," I said.

  "I am sincere. Wait! Oh no! What is 'friend'?"

  I explained the concept of friendship to an extraterrestrial. "Oh, it's that," said Tetsuo with relief. "I thought it just means someone you know, like in social networking. Don't be afraid, Ariel, you and I are friends in this new sense as well. However, I deliver a message for you by the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs. They would really like it if you came back to Earth."

  "I bet they would!" I said.

  "Krakowski says to inform you that come back now, and the BEA offer you limited immunity," said Tetsuo. "Like, fire resistance, I guess."

  "Not happening," I said.

  "He thanks you for shunning the media—as do I, incidentally. He also expresses the belief that one day your store goes out of business."

  "What store?"

  "It was a subtle threat, delivered idiomatically."

  "Don't interpret. What were the exact words that came
out of his mouth?"

  "He said: 'Your patron won't protect you forever.'"

  "That's you," I said. "The Constellation is my patron. You're protecting me."

  "We're doing nothing!" said Tetsuo. "What do they wish?"

  "They wish you to cooperate," I said. "If you're powerful and you do nothing, you're protecting me."

  "This is too confusing," said Tetsuo. "Why can't we just have anarchy?"

  "Use your history," I said. "What would the Ip Shkoy have said if you suggested that?"

  "They would have probably killed me," said Tetsuo.

  "Did Jenny— has Jenny asked about me?" I said.

  "Not asked me of you," said Tetsuo. "Surely she would ask you directly of you?"

  "I don't pretend to understand women," I said.

  "I have not finished delivering the message from Krakowski," said Tetsuo. "Please don't distract me with questions about persons other than. The said Mr. Krakowski finally craves the knowledge of how you were able to travel to Ring City, evading his system of document control."

  "I bet he does!" I said.

  "What shall I tell him?"

  "Why is he so obsessed with this?" I asked. "Curic broke the Greenland Treaty and dropped a shuttle for me. It probably showed up on radar. What's so difficult to believe?"

  "I presume he enjoys hearing the story again and again. It's sitcom-esque."

  "Okay, you know what? Tell him I walked through the other end of the port."

  "You had no port," said Tetsuo. "The idea only is a high-temperature fantasy."

  "You tell him I walked through the port," I said. "Tell him that, and watch him squirm."

  Real life, October 19

  "I'm only picking up so you'll stop calling," said Jenny.

  "Did you countersign the papers?" I asked her.

  "What do you think?" she asked. "Why would I want to run a game company? Especially when the sole developer goes fugitive without finishing the first game? That doesn't exactly scream 'lucrative Reflex Games buyout.' Or even 'occasional paycheck.'"

  I paced. I peeled back the drape and looked out my window. On the other side was a beige wall made from moon rock.

  "I finished the engine," I said. "You just need to contract for the level design. I'll give you some names from my time with the Brazilians. Zhenya can do it no problem."

  "Do. Not. Want. If they extradite you, I'll testify on your behalf. That is the extent of my involvement. I'll say that you're basically a good person who tries to ensure that his bad decisions don't hurt anyone else."

  "Did Krakowski stop by your place yet?"

  "What are you doing up there?"

  "Can you please answer my question?"

  "Shut yer donut hole. Krakowski came over thirty minutes after you told the world you'd left. He was... wow. He took the embarrassing seven-page letter you gave me, and the clothes of yours that were in the hamper when you moved, and the pickles you left in the fridge. Everything that had anything to do with you. If I'd told him the garbage was yours, he would have taken it out for me. Then he probably went to your flophouse to vacuum your skin flakes off the carpet."

  Mmm, delicious pickles. I wandered into the kitchen and opened my fridge. In a jar in the door, six identical farmers-market pickles bobbed in replica brine. I popped the lid and bit into a pickle. It was really really good.

  "Can you promise me," said Jenny, "that whatever plan you have up there to stop us all from turning into Slow People, you will carry it out and not abandon it because you saw something shiny. Be an adult and finish something for once in your life."

  "Protector of Earth," I said.

  "That's a totally unfair comparision," said Jenny. "You can't actually build something like that."

  Crunch crunch.

  "I don't think we have anything else to say to each other," said Jenny. "Call me when you're done saving the world."

  "Jenny."

  "When you're done."

  Real life, October 25

  By now Somn's smart-paper computer covered the room like newspaper. It was piled and folded all over into 3D sculptures of fossil shark teeth. Thousands of teeth. Prehistoric mountain ranges slid in matching sets towards Somn's nest, the paper rippling and creasing like a cartoon mouse under a blanket. With brief gestures, Somn classified the origami teeth as they reached her, and the fossils sank into the paper and drowned a second time. The paper near Somn's nest always stayed flat and smooth.

  "Mostly I miss Jenny," I told her. "I miss talking about weird game ideas and weird art."

  Somn pointedly began to ignore the waves of fossil teeth, which paused in their approach. "May I see her art?" she said. "Has it been scanned yet?"

  "She doesn't really exhibit," I said. "I mean, her stuff is good, but she's no Brandon Bird."

  "Her work won't improve unless she submits it to public criticism."

  "Yeah, that's not a helpful thing to say." I poked at a nearby shark tooth. It wasn't really sharp: just folded paper.

  "You visited the station in July," said Somn. "You knew what it was like here. Please take some responsibility."

  "I didn't know I'd be sleeping alone," I said. "I spend all day in these G-dforsaken Rings where the temperature's five hundred degrees, just so the inhabitants can talk to a real live human. And I come back to these hallways. I just want to climb under the covers and pretend I'm back in Austin. There's no art in Human Ring, no nature, nothing to look at except that fucking Banksy mural. If it wasn't for soccer with the Eritreans, I'd already have gone crazy." I breathed into my atmospheric filter like it was a paper bag.

  "You know, if you don't like your environment... no, I'm sorry. Never mind."

  "You can't never-mind something like that," I said. "What is it?"

  "In theory, you can change it," said Somn. "No one will stop you. Human Ring belongs to the humans. The architecture is a default, a simple reduced fractal. We didn't know what you liked."

  "Well, we don't like beige, and tiny cubicle rooms."

  "It was an understandable mistake," said Somn. "I said 'never mind' because you would have to be fluent in metafractal reduction to re-terraform Human Ring as a whole. I've never heard of a human with this skill. I don't think your civilization is specialized enough to have invented it."

  "Curic mentioned it once," I said. "She said they wanted to teach it to famous architects. Like they're ever going to let a bunch of architects up here."

  Somn idly ran a finger down a school of teeth morphologies, bending the paper back. "Maybe you should install an atmospheric filter in your throat and move here, to Alien Ring. We'd love to have you."

  "Or maybe I should stop bitching and learn how to do metafractal reduction," I said. "How does it work?"

  "I don't understand it well myself. A normal fractal is self-similar, yes? But a metafractal is made of smaller metafractals. It's defined recursively, but it's not the same at all levels of detail."

  Somn's Purchtrin-English translator didn't seem to find this difficult at all. It all came out in the same bland, chipper B-list celebrity tone as when she told me about Daisy's adventures with the dolphins. (Dolphins are major douchebags, BTW.)

  "Metafractals are infinitely recursive, but you can approximate one in the real universe by reducing it. A reduced metafractal has a concrete lowest level. The higher levels are the lowest level's emergent properties. To reduce a metafractal, you must keep every level of the architecture simultaneously in mind. While manipulating causality to create the large-scale attributes you want. I doubt all of that made it through the language barrier, but maybe you see how difficult it is."

  "Architecture, lowest level, emergent properties," I said. "I already have this skill. We call it computer programming."

  "Oh, I see," said Somn. "Have you reduced any good metafractals lately?"

  "Well, there was some hackwork about ponies, and a remake of a Farang game—the point is, I know how to do it. It's close enough."

  "Let's enjoy doing it,"
said Somn. "As you can tell, I don't know much about metafractal reduction, but I'll get you in touch with the Form and Function overlay and someone—"

  A Gaijin voice started whistling at Somn in a Gaijin language. All across the room, the shark teeth flattened out, leaving the floor covered with blank smart paper.

  "What's going on?" I said.

  "No kidding!" said Somn. She lifted herself off her nest and began crawling into her spacesuit. "Ariel, I have to leave. Please excuse me. Watch the eggs until Esteban gets here."

  "I don't— can't—"

  "Don't incubate them! Just watch them for a minute. I must go to Mars."

  "What's so important?" I asked. "What's on Mars?"

  Somn looked up at me through her faceplate and ran her tongue across her mouth: in Alien terms, a big big smile.

  "Fossils."

  * * *

  Chapter 32: The Evidence of Absence

  Real life, October 25, continued

  "So there aren't any fossils," I said. "We've been ripped off yet again."

  "They're fossil imprints," said Somn. "It's almost as good." Somn cracked a grey Mars rock along a fracture line and held out one half in each forehand. Inside was the imprint of a curved, pointy shell like a fleur-de-lis. The negative space where a fossil had been. "Look; see."

  A chill ran down my spine. This is a clam from Mars, I thought. This is an alien fossil. And then I remembered who was showing me the fossil.

  "What happened to the fossils themselves? Like acid rain, or..."

  "Gee, I don't know," said Somn. "Do you know of anything that likes to visit dead planets and take their fossils?"

  "I was hoping you wouldn't say that."

  "I said it. I affirm it."

  "When... did Ragtime come to Mars?"

  "That's an interesting question," said Somn. She handed me half of the imprint and poked at the other half with what looked like a plastic coffee stirrer. "The imprints are very clear. I estimate the fossils were removed within the past one hundred million years. Since at least one other body in this system still supports complex life, the phenomenon you call Ragtime probably never left."