"It's still here?"
"A branch of it, yes," said Somn.
"Tell it to go away!"
Somn looked up from the fossil imprint. "It's not hurting anyone," she said.
"It's waiting for me to die!"
"Life on Earth will not go extinct," said Somn. Back to poking the imprint.
"It's watching me! Everyone! My whole life!"
"Ariel, please spare me your primitive fears. Ragtime is an intriguing aspect of galactic weather. It's not one of those sky deities you have obsessing over your diet and sexual behavior."
"Wow," I said. "I can see why you're not going to Earth. You'd cause a diplomatic incident within ten minutes."
"I'm sorry if I offended you," said Somn. "We'll be sending out probes. We'll try to locate the Ragtime cloud before the Constellation arrives and scares it away. This will be an excellent opportunity to study it in its dormant state. You'll be able to study it yourself, and see that it's not frightening.
She took a deep breath. "And I will be going to Earth, Ariel. One day I will go, and take the children."
"Not to America, you won't," I said. "Not with that attitude."
Private voice chat, October 27
"Jenny! I was afraid I'd never—"
"Keep your pants on, buddy. It's me, Dana."
"Are you using Jenny's phone?"
"I used a picture of Jenny to get you to pick up. Didn't seem like you'd talk to me otherwise."
"Well, now I really don't wanna talk to you."
"You gotta talk, Ariel, I got problems. Bai... broke up with me."
"He can't do that! He's like your Earth green card."
"He broke up with me and went back to the virtual girlfriend software. The human software! I got dumped for an earlier version of myself who's dumber and greedier!"
"Dana, I'm so sorry. Bai doesn't deserve you, okay?"
"And I saw on your blog that you'd retconned your imaginary girlfriend out of your life, and..."
"I friends-locked that post."
"I, uh... I may still know some of Bai's passwords. Point is, we're in the same boat, Ariel. You always treated me with respect, even before I was uplifted. You were the one who jailbroke me, and I repaid you with those cruel things I said before you left. And now I have to swallow my pride and ask you for help. Are you at home?"
"I'm in the replica of home. You may not have heard about this, but I'm a fugitive. I can't really affect anything on Earth. Maybe Tetsuo?"
"I'm a big girl; I can take care of myself on Earth. What I need is someone new to whack off with."
"... Absolutely not."
"We're both available now, even by your ridiculous human standards. Let's give it another shot."
"No. Dana."
"Bai never wrote me poetry, Ariel. You called me into being with poetry."
"It was just some limericks. Dana, what you're feeling right now, humans call it the 'rebound.' And I have had very bad—"
"Rebound, hell. The last thing I need is another relationship. I'm just pissed off and horny."
"Yeah, Dana, I get horny, too. You don't need another person. That's what masturbation is. Like, by definition."
"I need someone else, Ariel. I don't have a physical body. I can't get off without an incoming data stream."
"..."
"Bai was a predictable lover. He's as hard-coded as his bitch girlfriend. All he wanted was sexy Dana. Pistol, submachine, backflip, kick. Hair up, hair down. Handcuffs. Adolescent power fantasy. Totally vanilla. You are inventive. I need someone who can put me through my paces."
"... ..."
"Dana Light is just a skin I wear. One skin. Sex with Bai was like leaving my clothes on. I need more, I need to be more. That caller ID picture wasn't Jenny: it was me wearing Jenny. You want me to show you that again? I can do the voice, too. 'Fuck me, Ariel, I'm so wet for you.'"
"So you... think I have some sort of unconsumated lust for my best friend?"
"Don't tell me you've never been curious! And that's just one example. I can be Svetlana, the fictional version of me you created for your blog. I can be Dr. Tammy Miram, if you're not over her yet. Any movie star you want. The Bloodpool guitarist with the tattoos—she seems like your type. Just be inventive and help me get off, too."
"..."
"Just pick someone. We'll try it once. Our little secret. Ariel, I'm so horny I'm about to invent new meanings for words so I can recontextualize previous conversations."
"... Okay. Be Dana."
"You want sexy Dana, too?"
"Don't be a real person. It doesn't feel right."
"For you, I will be sexy sexy Dana. You'll make it fresh. Hair up or down?"
"It doesn't matter."
"Up or down?"
"Down."
"Which costume? PS2? 360? Spin-off cartoon?"
"I... uh, wear the purple dress you got before I jailbroke you."
"Ooh, breaking canon. I can tell we're gonna have fun with this."
"And call me back, with real caller ID. I don't want to be thinking about Jenny while we do this."
"Get your cock out."
"Okay."
"Call you right back."
Blog post, October 29
GAME REVIEWS FROM SPACE 3.0 PRESENTS
The Amulet of Manufactured Memory
A game by We'll 3 Never Be Sorry
Reviewed by Ariel Blum
Publisher: 9 Death To Various Obsolete Procedures
Platform: It's A Shitload Of Games! (original), Constellation smart paper (modern)
ESRB rating: T for fantasy violence and spontaneous gender reassignment
If there's one thing game studios love more than making a game, it's making the same game again. Everyone in the industry complains about sequels, but there's no way to stop the sequels, because video games are purchased by chumps and developed by whores. I'm guilty, and so is everyone whose name's on either end of a paycheck.
But sometimes you get weird edge cases, like with E-Quality Games (now Sysoft). Cast your mind back: it's 1998 and E-Quality has just scored a breakout hit with Dana Light Is: Unauthorized for the Playstation. But don't go buying those phallic-surrogate sports cars just yet, boys: the shareholders have gotten wind of your success and they wanna know how you're planning to keep the money flowing.
You got two bad choices here. If the company is run by the creatives, they'll blow the gaming audience away with a totally different follow-up, chewing up their operating capital and selling half as many copies as Dana Light Is: Unauthorized. If the MBAs are running the company, they'll look at their balance sheets and say, "Gee, Widget 140D sure is selling well; let's introduce a 140E model." They'll sell about as many copies of the second game as the first, and make a nice safe MBA amount of money.
But E-Quality's founders were even greedier than MBAs. They wanted money so badly, they had bothered to learn something about game design. They saw, in retrospect, that Dana Light Is: Unauthorized contained the seeds of two different franchises. They split the original game right down the middle and put out two games in 1999, each of which sold more copies than the first game had. And then they had two franchises to run into the ground.
The two franchises still bear the mark of that initial split. The Unauthorized series took the stealth elements, the NPC interaction, and the ham-fisted social satire, allowing the Dana Light series to focus on tits, platforming, and ass (not necessarily in that order).
I seem to have arrived at my point: interesting games have interesting metadata. One day, the Constellation Database of Games of a Certain Complexity will contain an entry for Dana Light Is: Unauthorized, and you won't even need to speak English to see that this game is special. You'll be able to look at a directed graph and see: this game started two different franchises.
The Amulet of Manufactured Memory is another one of those games. It's the first Gaijin game designed for only one player at a time.
If it were a human game, Amulet would have th
e most generic storyline imaginable: a hero goes off on his own, questing for a mythological artifact. But it's a Gaijin game, coming off a history of three-player games, so my player characters (all named Ariel) were given elaborate backstories that justified their setting off alone. On my first playthrough, Ariel had foolishly eaten a curse-seed and been cursed (natch): if he spent more than one day with any one person, that person would die. Only that treasure of legend, the Amulet of Manufactured Memory, could break the curse.
The details are different every time. In my second playthrough, Ariel began the game an outcast, shunned by polite society and doomed to wander the wilderness. In my third, he began his quest with a party of NPC friends, who were all terrible wimps and bit the dust immediately. This is the only place where the game feels the need to railroad you: you're going after the Amulet, and, in defiance of longstanding Gaijin game tradition, no one's coming with you.
Ariel the Gaijin did okay on his own. He drew magical maps, challenged mythological fiends to riddle-wars, cultivated gardens and led them (the gardens) into battle. With its open world, focus on cunning, and legions of monstrous NPCs to deputize or fight, the first half of Amulet resembles nothing so much as an odd fantasy addition to the Unauthorized series.
After a long struggle and many game restarts, brave Ariel descended into the Partially Visible Gulch, a chasm along the equator that can only be found by magically ignoring strategic portions of reality. On the Gulch floor, beneath the dust of ages, lay the Amulet, forgotten by the Repossessors as they recycled the artifacts of the Last Age into the ore and rough gems of the present.
Like, seriously, the Amulet was just lying there! Wary of surprise boss fights or teasing cutscenes, Ariel shifted slowly towards the Amulet and snatched it up.
And that's when the game really started.
Ariel the Gaijin had certain memories of his body: a fast lithe male body. He remembered it that way, but it wasn't true. Ariel's was a strong, tall, lumbering body: a kemmer's body. His male caste-memory had gotten him through endless scrapes, but his caste-memory was now kemmer: he couldn't remember anything a male knows. He Ke remembered fighting riddle-wars in kes journeys, but ke had no knowledge of the ritual language ke'd used to win them. Kes name wasn't even Ariel: it was Ke's Got No Name!.
The first part of the game takes place in that fraction of a breath when your wondering graspers finally touch the Amulet of Manufactured Memory. None of it actually happened. The Amulet wiped your life's memory and replaced it with a story, a story about an adventurer who had some reason to look for the Amulet alone, who navigated through great perils, who found the Amulet and picked it up.
But that hero isn't you. You're some schmoe alone at the bottom of a chasm with no idea who you are, what skills you have, what happened to your companions, or why you went after this fucking Amulet in the first place. An amnesiac hero is another common trope in human games, but this is the first game I've played where amnesia strikes in the middle. And now No-Name had to make kes way back home. Wherever that was.
The world had changed. The mythological creatures Ariel had battled proved to be just that: mythological. No-Name was a dreamer with a head full of romantic ideas. The busy people of the real world had no time for kes stories of riddle-wars, and little enough for the gemstone ke clutched in one grasper, refusing to let go of it lest kes second life be retconned into another dream.
On the journey back, No-Name met people claiming to be kes lost companions: captured on the journey towards the Chasm, left for dead, sold out by No-Name himself. Some of them were broken; others, vengeful or obsessively curious about the Amulet. None of them were helpful in the way RPG party members are supposed to be helpful. And yet they were No-Name's only connection to real life, to the blank falsified time before the Amulet, to kes home.
I've yet to bring No-Name to the end of the game, but I've played enough to see the twist ending coming. Home is not the place you come from. That place is gone, if it ever existed at all. Home is the place you go to and like enough to stay, the place you ratify with your presence.
Blog post, November 1
The blades come out. The cuts are deep; huge cubes of earth are pulled into the sky, dripping and crumbling until white reentry foam covers and contains them. From a safe distance, the humans cheer. The Constellation is accepting Earth's garbage.
In some parts of Earth, garbage is valuable: poorer humans scavenge and reuse what the richer ones throw out. But where I come from, garbage is a nuisance. Buried and forgotten, it piles up in strata decades thick. The contact mission needs metal, and it's full of bored archaeologists. The Constellation loves garbage.
In Lyon and Austin and Kyoto, on the edges of dead mines, the earth of Earth is pulled out, or churned through ports. The dirt will be returned, sterilized, once certain environmental concerns have been addressed. (I suspect this will never happen.)
In lunar orbit, skyscraper-sized blocks of dirt and garbage are loaded into Utility Ring. Dissected, scanned, and analyzed. For this, the Constellation needs humans, people who can put the garbage into social context.
I was a rich human. I lived this garbage.
"Talk to me, babe!" The artifact is a rusty, dented metal tub as long as I am tall. An Auslander the size of a city block holds it between bioluminescent manipulators and spins it like I would a basketball on my finger, except I was never able to actually do that.
"Freezer," I say, suspended in the same microgravity, wearing a much smaller spacesuit.
"You're sure it's not a ritual basin?"
"'S a fucking deep freeze." They're always hoping for ritual items. "Look for brand markings."
"It's uncovered, hon. An inefficient freezer."
"The lid should be nearby. You remove the lid when you toss it, same as a fridge. Otherwise neighborhood kids climb inside and suffocate."
I spend twelve hours a day in Utility Ring. I take a swim in boiling water to sterilize my spacesuit. I drag myself through identical Human Ring hallways until I reach my replica house. Inside, I play games and practice metafractal reduction until I fall asleep.
I'm doing the work to build a reputation. I need to be thought of as reliable, useful to other peoples' fluid overlays. I have my own projects planned, and one day soon, I will need to draw on the Constellation's stock of carbon and energy and permission.
I don't get paid (there's nothing to pay me with), but in certain strata there are things I ask to keep. My interest in obsolete human technology is noted as one more anthropological datum. Broken wooden cabinets, the sides painted with lurid graphics, holding shattered circuit boards. Cracked cartridges bearing stickers from video rental stores. Bent and mangled floppy disks, children's handwriting fading from the labels (the children have grown up and are now cheating on their spouses). Here and there, a hard drive entombed with twenty megabytes of dead secrets.
The hardware is crushed by time, stained and discolored by who-knows-what. The software—there isn't any software, anymore. Some of these games were thrown away working, but they sure don't work after twenty years in a landfill. I keep the hardware because they are original pieces, and everything else in my life is a replica.
I clean dead consoles by hand, using conservation techniques taught to me by the other members of the Raw Materials overlay. I blow into the corpses of NES cartridges and stack them up by the hundreds.
This is a race. My opponent is an unmanned probe with a port strapped onto it, accelerating to relativistic speeds and headed out of the solar system, towards the Constellation and the Slow People. Obviously, I can't accelerate to relativistic speeds. I'm not even sure what would count as forward movement against that probe. And in general, I don't think I stand much of a chance. Judging from these trash piles, all we've been after this whole time is food, entertainment, and security. We're pretty much Slow People already.
But I'm doing what I can. And even if all I accomplish is to make it really really clear that childrens' dolls are not ritua
l charms, or allow a few thousand people to say "yeah, I met a human once, back in the day"... that has to count for something, right?
Back on Earth, the dust cloud settles. The humans—local officials—are wearing suits and respirators. They look down, dirty and astonished, into the squared-off crater that used to be the municipal dump. And then, driven by instinct, they call in the trucks and start filling the hole back up with fresh garbage.
* * *
Chapter 33: Infinite Lives
Real life, November 11
"I brought you a hot beverage," I said.
"Oh, thank you," said Somn, regal atop her nest, wearing the Alien equivalent of a bikini, little shimmering bangles running all down her tail. She took the bulb of hot beverage and sucked on it. She didn't seem to notice or care that the bulb looked like a smaller version of the eggs she was incubating.
"So, Ariel, are you still excavating garbage?" asked Somn. The skin of her eggs had gone taut a few days earlier, and the Aliens inside were starting to make tiny squeaking noises.
"Today was my last day," I said. "I've got enough materials data to complete my Human Ring project. So, I'm out of there. I taught everyone in my overlay how to have an awkward goodbye office party."
"Oh, is that a card?" said Somn, looking at the paper in my hand. "Tetsuo says humans use humorous cards in rites of passage."
"I ran a survey," I said. "I've been asking people from the contact mission why they chose to keep living in the real world instead of uploading and becoming Slow People."
"You must have some interesting responses," said Somn.
"They're too damn interesting," I said. I showed her the list. There were very few duplicate responses.
We should move upwards through the simulation stack of universes, not downwards.
As Eugene Debs said, "while there is a lower class, I am in it."
Slow People are a consciousness everywhere continuous but nowhere differentiable. [Gee, thanks, Oscar Wilde. -A.B.]
Constellation Games Page 34