Constellation Games

by Leonard Richardson

  "But that's not a constant, it's how human society works. I sell my time and my pride for a chunk of that twenty million and the right to bitch about it ineffectually. That's what Curic meant when she asked if I'd been bargaining with myself. But I don't need money anymore. I'm infinitely wealthy."

  "Well, good for fuckin' you," said Adam. "The rest of us still have to work for a living."

  "You have a choice," I said. "You're already here. You don't have to go back."

  Adam looked up the infinite hallway again, then back at me, like are you kidding?. "No thanks," he said. "I have a family, and I like living with humans, in a place where I can see the sky."

  "Okay," I said. "I just wanted to point it out. Most people don't even get the choice."

  "This was a waste of time," said Adam, "and now I'm lost in Human Ring. I can't believe Tetsuo thought you'd be interested."

  "Tetsuo?" I said. "You talked to Tetsuo?"

  "He didn't talk to you you?" said Adam. "He's our cultural consultant. The Ragtime thing was his idea. So was hiring you."

  "No," I said. I started packing up my picnic. "He didn't talk to me. But he's gonna."

  Real life, December 7

  "I just learned something disturbing," I told Tetsuo Milk.

  "I just learned that live animals are sometimes considered property!" said Tetsuo.

  "I... I still think I can win this round," I said. "Because I learned that you're working with Reflex Games on that Disputed Space piece of shit."

  Outernet video quality kept getting better as more people switched to smart paper. I was getting twenty frames a second of Tetsuo's office at UT Austin. I could see the posters behind him go through their animations: Tetsuo's home planet; Somn doing something, probably masturbating. One poster showed a stream of blocky blown-up animated GIFs from Constellechan.

  In the foreground, twenty frames of Tetsuo a second. He knelt in front of a low desk, looking down at me, nursing a bottle of hot sauce. You'll Only See Kis Shadow! had gone home. It was early morning, Austin time.

  "I work with them," said Tetsuo. "It's not secret. My name is on their website!" He said this with the tone of someone who's finally hit the big time.

  "Sorry, I've been out of the loop," I said. "I've been reprogramming matter shifters. I don't have time to keep my friends out of trouble."

  "Thanks for classifying all that garbage," said Tetsuo. "The data's very good."

  "Well, look at the data for one second, Tets. The washing machine in the 1988 strata is the same as one in the 1984 strata. They change it just enough so you'll buy a new one. And now they make games that way, too. You can't get them to change anything except textures and maps and who the bad guy is. People will keep thinking Ragtime is some kind of malevolent entity instead of a fucking... nebula. And your name will be on that."

  "Do you think I'm a dumb guy, Ariel?" asked Tetsuo. No sarcasm, no anger, just a regular question.

  "I think you can be... kind of naive, sometimes?" I said.

  "I sorted through garbage," said Tetsuo. "I sorted the garbage of the Ip Shkoy. It was replica garbage, with purpose of training historians. Other people on this mission have not gone through garbage. They're surprised by your garbage!

  "Ha ha! I'm not surprised! I know about the washing machines! I saw how your labor was coordinated to produce Pôneis Brilhantes. I even know what your garbage will look like in the future."

  "What will it look like?" My replica house was creaking, settling down for the night. Curic had even gotten the sounds right.

  With one forehand Tetsuo picked up a stray scrap of smart paper and folded it into an origami cube. "It will still look like garbage," he said. "But it won't accumulate."

  "Why are you making more garbage?" I said. "You told this guy Adam to come up and recruit me back to Reflex? Why the hell would I want that?" Except I kind of had wanted that.

  "Do you remember The Long Way Around?" asked Tetsuo. He squished the cube between two fingers.

  "Yeah," I said. "It was one of Af be Hui's games. You're trapped on a strange planet."

  "You're trapped because an asteroid hit with the planet," said Tetsuo. "The hit collapsed the port you went through, and now you can't get back."

  "You didn't mention that when we played it," I said. "Is that the backstory?"

  "Search the game database about asteroids," said Tetsuo. "We made a lot of games about asteroids hitting with planets."

  "'We' here is the Ip Shkoy?" I started typing a query against the CDBOEGOACC.

  "Down was hit with asteroids often," said Tetsuo. "A few million years, another asteroid hits with us. The forests burn and the ocean life dies. We didn't know about it. We were the second form of intelligent life to come from our planet, and we didn't even know what killed the earlier guys."

  "I'm... sorry?" I said. I wasn't sure what kind of greeting card you send for that situation.

  "Then they came," said Tetsuo, his voice envious and afraid of them. "Came the monsters from space and they said: you have an asteroid problem, but we can help. What happened to the earlier guys ought not to happen to you.

  "Well, everyone enjoyed a shitting the pants. Suddenly everything bad from ancient history was an asteroid's fault. We had to decide to fear the space monsters or the asteroids, and we mostly decided the asteroids."

  The query ran. Tetsuo French-kissed the hot sauce bottle to get the last of it. There were over a hundred Ip Shkoy-era games about clobbering or getting clobbered with asteroids.

  "You also have an asteroid problem, Ariel," said Tetsuo. His numb tongue made his accent worse. "You already know this problem. You could move the asteroids if you wanted, so you don't worry for the problem."

  From his desk Tetsuo picked up an old Star Trek action figure I'd given him, and fiddled with the articulations. "Whenever we tell you of a problem, you know it already," he said. "So you don't worry for it. Instead you decide to fear us, the monsters from space, because we are new. But suppose..."

  "But suppose Tetsuo Milk looks at us with his watery anime eyes," I said, "and says some really scary shit in his adorable Purchtrin accent. About something we didn't know about before, like Ragtime? He's kind of a dumb guy. Maybe he lets things slip sometimes. We should pay attention."

  "The agent Krakowski keeps telling me to shut up," said Tetsuo. "But he never stops listening."

  "Because telling you to shut up is the best way to keep you talking," I said. "Man, you are playing with fire."

  "There is no other material to play with," said Tetsuo.

  "Have you thought about what happens if this works? You'll get a generation of humans afraid to leave Earth because you trolled everyone with the terrible secret of space."

  "I shouldn't say what I think will really happen," said Tetsuo.

  "And now you're keeping secrets?" I said. "That's Curic's thing. You were always... don't be like this, Tets."

  "I am declining to play my cards upfaced," said Tetsuo. "The BEA is recording what we say."

  "You need to tell me this shit!" I said. "I'm an outlaw. I'm--wait, they bugged the Outernet?" I was a little disappointed. "That was fast."

  "No, it just bugged my office," said Tetsuo. He held my old action figure in front of his smart paper. A tiny black dot was visible at the base of the neck: stolen Constellation technology. "It doesn't usually matter."

  Curic had wanted information from me, and I'd gone along because she'd offered things in return. She'd asked for more, and she'd offered more, and I'd done more, and here I was. Tetsuo had only ever wanted to have fun playing video games with me.

  But now Tetsuo was nearly a father, and I was... whatever I was about to become. We were adults, running through life without knowing the outcome, talking to each other across a chasm of schemes and politics, like my parents at faculty parties.

  "I'm hanging up," I said. "Just tell me one thing, for the record. Does Ragtime even exist? Or did you guys make it up to scare people?"

  "It exists," sa
id Tetsuo. He spoke clearly into the action figure. "It has always existed. It's older than the universe."

  ABlum: you're an asshole

  * * *

  TetsuoMilkPhD: hahahaha

  Blog post, December 12

  GAME REVIEWS FROM SPACE 3.0 PRESENTS

  A Few Ip Shkoy Games About Asteroids

  A cautionary tale by Ariel Blum

  Smelter Losers (Kunu) Collect small asteroids in a matter shifter to build a bigger matter shifter to collect bigger asteroids. Repeat indefinitely.

  The Long Way Around (Perea): Survive on a hostile planet after the port you came through is collapsed by an asteroid impact. Indulge the PC's fantasies of crafting a spaceship and getting home "the long way around," even though the insane crafting system means this is almost certainly impossible.

  To Cover The Forest Forever (Perea): Ip Shkoy chick on a date can't get to first base because endless hail of asteroid impacts keeps burning down the venues. Zap the incoming asteroids a la City Defense and be rewarded with porn. Apparently first base is the only base.

  Occluded Occlusion (Ul Neie - Restored Leadership) Tile-sliding game with heavy math. Combine thrust vectors to knock asteroids into the sun. Second player has their own sun; don't touch it or they get the points.

  Untitled (The Great Hall of the People And Also Science) Quiz game installed in kiosks for a museum exhibit. Test your knowledge of Ip Shkoy knowledge of asteroids, from their importance in ancient mythology, to their seedy past causing mass extinctions, to the then-modern-day planetary defense project. Answer correctly and be rewarded with porn.

  G'go Station: Beseiged in Space (G'go) Someone is killing your colleagues at the Asteroid Damage Mitigation Overlay! Talk to NPCs, bust some skulls, and piece clues together to unravel the mystery. The mystery unravels in more ways than one when it's revealed that an asteroid has been going around stabbing people to sabotage the project. That's right, a sentient asteroid with a fucking knife. We're done here, people.

  * * *

  Chapter 34: The Unilateral Extradition Expedition

  Real life, December 26

  "Merry Christmas, shithead."

  I woke up in a hammer lock, my face pressed against the headboard. I was at home, in my old house on Earth.

  "I'm... Jewish..." I said. No, I wasn't on Earth—this was the replica of my old house. The voice was from Earth, though. It was the voice of BEA Agent Krakoswki.

  "Happy holidays, shithead." Krakowski tilted my head and carefully knocked my forehead against the headboard, just hard enough to raise a lump. His hands were gloved, pebbled. He was wearing a spacesuit that had never seen vacuum.

  "Get up," he said. I couldn't move with Krakowski pinning me down, so I just acquiesced as he pulled me up. He just wanted to give a command and have me obey it.

  Krakowski held his left hand in front of my face. He had my grav kicker attached to his fingers like a clip-on set of brass knuckles. "This is a grav kicker," said Krakowski. "Constellation use it to set up standing gravity waves. Helps them maneuver in zero gravity."

  "That's my grav kicker," I said. "I know what it is. I use it every day."

  "Thing is," said Krakowski, "it also makes a great non-lethal weapon." He shoved me forward, swung his arm in an arc like he was playing slow-pitch, and squeezed the kicker. A standing gravity wave formed between us and slammed me into my nightstand. As I fell over, the gravity wave echoed off the wall and interfered destructively with itself inside my guts. I dropped to my knees and barfed up replica french fries and cranberry aioli.

  "You got any more?" Krakowski crouched down next to me, wiped my mouth with one of my dirty T-shirts. "Get it all out. Nobody likes puke in a spacesuit."

  "Spacesuit?" I asked.

  "Get it on," said Krakowski. "We're going outside. I don't want any accidents."

  I crawled over to my desk and pulled myself to my feet. On my desk was a paper computer showing my incomplete reduced-fractal redesign of Human Ring. I turned away from Krakowski, giving exaggerated pants, and brushed my thumb against the START control.

  "Okay," I said, "Okay." The pain from the kicker faded quickly, but I moved deliberately into my suit, coughing and wiping my nose. He thinks I'm a wimp, I thought. Let him think I'm a wimp.

  "Hurry it up," said Krakowski. I glared at him. I got my suit on. "Pressurize it." I pressurized it. Discolored creases around the joints popped out as the suit inflated.

  I saw a brief faint blue glow from outside—Cherenkov radiation. At least some part of my metafractal reduction was working. Krakowski wrenched both my hands behind my back and I heard a spraying sound. He let me go. My arms were fixed in place, bound in an obnoxious yoga pose.

  "This is reentry foam," said Krakowski. "I know you're familiar with it. Now, we can do this the hard way or the easy way. You're going to walk with me to the reception chamber, we'll board a ship, and we'll take a nice twenty-minute trip back to Earth."

  "Why did you put the hard way first?"

  "We're doing it the hard way now," said Krakowski.

  "What's the easy way?"

  "I can cover the rest of your body with this foam and drop you to Earth like a packing crate," he said. "That would be very easy for me. So don't give me any trouble."

  "Sure, Krakowski," I said, "no trouble."

  "Suit mic off, shithead," said Krakowski, and slapped my helmet. "You broadcast anything, I'll hear it too." But he didn't cover me with reentry foam for my trouble. Instead, he muscled me stumbling downstairs to the living room.

  "Nobody ever checks the reception chamber." I could almost see Krakowski's smirk behind me. "Barely been used since first contact. Perfect site for a little black op."

  I took one last look around. It didn't feel like I'd see this house again, on any planet. Krakowski slipped ahead of me and opened my front door.

  "What in mother of fuck!" he shouted.

  Krakowski'd come into my house from a beige, well-lit Human Ring hallway identical to every other. He was walking out into the Surrealist wing of an art museum. The walls were dead voids, synthetic obsidian, like space without stars. Huge, lurid paintings leapt from the walls, set apart with frames of gleaming white metal ten microns thick. Dali's Harpo Agonistes. Tanguy's During the Silence. Magritte's L'été de la raison. Duchamp's enormous Culmination, up high where I could see it from my second-story window. All my favorites, all recreated in museum-quality fidelity.

  "What did you do?" demanded Krakowski, instinctively knowing that I was to blame.

  "Human Ring is being re-terraformed," I said. "We can't go out there. We need to sit tight for a few hours."

  "What did you do?" he repeated.

  "Human Ring has a half million miles of hallway," I said. "Every day, the Constellation scans tens of thousands of human artworks. I just put the two together."

  "You're turning the largest space station in history into an art museum?" said Krakowski. "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard."

  "I'm making it a place human beings will want to live," I said. "There will be real furniture, and multiple layouts, and open spaces, parks, with plants. And if you hadn't interrupted me before I finished, there'd be windows into space, and fucking pillows on the beds."

  "Well, I guess it's the thought that counts," said Krakowski. "Now let's get moving. You can give me a tour on the way to the reception chamber."

  I looked down the hall at the apartment I was using for storage. I hadn't excluded it from the metafractal. The consoles and cartridges I'd worked so hard to recover from the world's garbage dumps were gone, turned into raw materials and then into artworks and furniture.

  "I don't think you heard the part where we can't go out there," I said. "It's not a matter of convenience. There are autonomous matter shifters crawling the halls. They'll turn you into an installation piece. They don't conserve anything except mass and angular momentum."

  "Bullshit," said Krakowski. "Constellation tech is full of failsafes. It won't do anything to h
urt people."

  "Oh," I said, "Constellation tech, like the kicker and the reentry foam?"

  You don't see this look on authority figures anymore. Krakowski was trying to figure out if I was joking. Usually it doesn't matter: they're allowed to get pissed at you either way. But here there would be real-world consequences if I was serious.

  "You wouldn't do anything to hurt the Eritreans," Krakowski said finally.

  "The Eritreans rebuilt their neighborhood themselves," I said. "Re-terraforming is for the places where nobody lives. I'm talking altered-physics slow-light fusion, Krakowski. You get a dose of that Cherenkov radiation, your kids will come out pre-circumsized."

  "Then it's a good thing we have these reliable spacesuits," said Krakowski. "You will go first." I left my house at kickerpoint.

  "You're crazy," I told him. "The reception chamber is five miles—" I stepped off the last stair and started walking past the surrealist masters, eyes straight ahead, using awkward tongue gestures to send an instant message from inside my suit.

  "What's the matter?" said Krakowski. "Afraid of a little radiation?" I kept quiet.

  "You finally shut up, Blum. What's the secret?" I kept walking.

  "Oh, I see," said Krakowski. "You think we're going to get into an elevator. And the elevator will be a submind of the station computer. It'll say 'Hey, you're restricting that shithead's freedom of movement!' and it'll call its supermind for help."

  "Or," I said, "we're going to walk and climb and go through ports for five miles, and eventually people will start getting curious about what's going on in Human Ring."

  "Funny you should mention ports," said Krakowski, catching up to me. "Because I just happen to have requisitioned one from BEA stocks. I set one end in the reception chamber. The other one's right here. So the reception chamber isn't five miles away, Blum. It's fifty feet away. We'll be out of here before they even know you're gone. Keep walking!"

  With a hand-on-the-shoulder, Krakowski stopped me between two silver-gelatin Man Ray prints, at the door to an apartment. It was now an oak door festooned with Victorian carvings, instead of something you'd see on a submarine, but a door is a door.