Constellation Games

by Leonard Richardson

  "Twelve, thirteen, fourteen," said Krakowski. "This should be the one." He frowned. "Unless the matter shifters got the port, too. Open the door, Blum."

  "Hands!" I said. "Foam!"

  "Ah, right," said Krakowski. He opened the door and a tornado of smoke blew out. "Shit! Fire!"

  The day before, this apartment had been identical to every other apartment in Human Ring. After I started my program, it had spent a few minutes as a fancy Weimar-era Bauhaus apartment, its contents and layout determined by algorithm.

  Now it was ruined. The replica furniture was melted, scorched, and covered in fresh soil. The upholstery smouldered and bright flame slowly consumed the stark wallpaper.

  "Is this part of your plan?" said Krakowski. He sprayed down the cushions and the wall with reentry foam from a little can. The smoke started to clear.

  "No," I said. "I told you, I didn't finish everything. This looks like a bug."

  A metal-and-leather chair was embedded in the floor of the room. It had fallen into Krakowski's port, partially blocking it. The chair shivered and jerked in the mouth of the wormhole, pushed and pulled by a continuously shifting gravity differential.

  "At least that's still here," said Krakowski. "The way my day has been going..." He carefully crossed the room and pulled the chair out of the port. The leg that had been dangling over the other side had been cleanly sheared off.

  "..." said Krakowski, looking through the port. He looked seasick. Tactically speaking, this would have been a good time to run for it, but of course I had to inch into the room and take a peek, 'cause I'm an idiot.

  The other end of the port tumbled and rolled through an enormous volume of empty space, blown by strange winds, twisting and spinning, bouncing off matter precursors for which humans have no names. Flashes of fusion light through the port made the front of Krakowski's suit go opaque like a radiation badge. Gusts from that huge emptiness fanned the remaining wallpaper flames, making them dance like candles.

  "What happened to the reception chamber?" said Krakowski. "What's that hole? Where's my ship?"

  "I don't know!" I said. "I mean, the reception chamber's near the central cylinder, right? That whole area's being carved out for a big outdoor space, like the cma forest in Alien Ring. So there's no bug; you just fucked up space-time in a way I didn't plan for. You look through the port, you're looking at the big forest-park at the center of Human Ring. Thus the dirt."

  "You destroyed the reception chamber?" Krakowski stomped back to the doorway and shook me by the shoulders. "That was a UNESCO World Heritage Site!"

  "I would have preserved it!" I said. "Don't fuckin' kidnap me before I finish reducing a metafractal!"

  A cloud of synthetic dirt sprayed through the port at high pressure, covering our suits. Krakowski brushed at his shoulders.

  "Nice going," he said. "Quick thinking! We'll just go to the docking bay and take a shuttle from there! You've bought yourself fifteen minutes, and you've earned my everlasting enmity."

  "Enmity? Who talks like that?"

  "You talk like that, shithead! Move!" We left impressions in the dirt on our way out, dirty footprints in the hallway outside. Krakowski slammed the door.

  "Please halt!" said a gaspy syrupy voice. Krakowski spun around. A small spindly robot barred our way.

  "Who the hell are you?" said Krakowski.

  "That's a telepresence robot," I said. "Not a person robot."

  "I know that. Who's on the other end?"

  "My name is Curic," said the robot. "You probably don't remember me."

  "Don't flatter yourself," said Krakowski. "I know you. You're the bitch-bastard who caused this problem in the first place."

  "Then you know that Ariel enjoys my protection," said Curic, "and that I won't allow you to compromise his freedom of movement. I am here to stop you from forcibly relocating him back to Earth."

  "And how," sneered Krakowski, "will you stop me?"

  "By making you a better offer," said Curic. "By inviting you to stay here."

  Krakowski looked down at the robot like it was the plucky comic relief. "Stay here?" he said.

  "In Human Ring, or on Mars," said Curic. "Stay with us and help your fellow humans build societies that can cope with post-scarcity. Stop clutching at the badges of hierarchical status and the failed systems of your species' past."

  "That's not an offer," said Krakowski. "That's propaganda. An offer would be something I'd be at least slightly interested in."

  "Yeah, I'm with Krakowski here," I said. "This is your brilliant plan? Convince a federal agent to defect?"

  "What do you want me to do, Ariel? Coerce him? 'Beat him up?' That won't solve anything."

  "No, it will!" I said. "It really will! I promise!"

  "Face it, Curic," said Krakowski, "you have no way to handle this. Your superior system of social organization only works if everyone cooperates. You say 'coercion' like it's a dirty word, but coercion is just how the rules are enforced. You can't deal with someone like me. You've given up the tool because you don't like its name."

  "Coercion is how coercive rules are enforced," said Curic. "Nobody enforces the rules of a game. Nobody makes photons carry the electromagnetic force. That's just how the world works."

  Krakowski pointed my grav kicker at the telepresence robot and squeezed. Curic hit the hallway wall spread-eagle, twelve robotic arms splaying in an arc like a Da Vinci sketch, the body of the robot scratching the obsidian wall and cracking Duchamp's Fountain.

  "Curic!" I exclaimed, even though it was just a robot.

  The recoil knocked Krakowski on his ass. He'd fired it like a pistol, forgetting that a grav kicker is designed to push around the person using it. I broke and ran, down the hall, away from my house, away from the docking bay, towards the autonomous matter shifters.

  Krakowski lifted the kicker and ranged me with it again. I slapped face-down on the smooth black floor like a hole card in a poker hand, and slid ten feet down the hallway. Blood dripped from my lip onto the inside of my faceplate. Hands still bound, I tried to roll over and push myself over to the wall so I could stand up.

  Krakowski stood up. He made it look so easy. "Can you still hear me?" he yelled at the twitching immobile robot.

  "I'm not deaf," said Curic, her voice distorted.

  "As long as I've got you on the line," he said, "This would be a great time for you to tell me what you did with that fucking port."

  "I'll tell you in three years," said Curic.

  Krakowski walked over to my scrabbling self and pulled me to my feet. "The interesting thing about non-lethal weapons," he said loudly, "is that the more you use 'em on someone, the less non-lethal they get."

  "I'll tell you now," I said.

  "You're selling out humanity to save your own skin," sputtered the broken Curic-bot.

  "You never found the port," I said. "because Curic took it and jumped off a bridge into the river. She swam down to the Gulf of Mexico and she put a hole in the bottom of the ocean. Draining it at the same rate the ice caps are melting.

  "The other end of the port is in some basin on Mars. We'll still get the droughts and the famines, but the sea level won't rise and we won't lose our cities. We'll limp along for seventy years, long enough for the Slow People to come pick up our miserable husks. Am I right, Curic?"

  "No," said Curic.

  "Dunno what answer I could possibly have been expecting," I said. "Anyway, even if I'm telling the truth, you'll never find the port."

  "I do believe this is turning into a stalling tactic," said Krakowski. He pulled me back to Fountain and the Curic-bot. "Curic," he announced, "you're going to turn off your telepresence rig and stay where you are. Ariel and I are walking to the docking bay, where we will take a shuttle to Earth. You interfere with me, anyone interferes, and I start using this useful little device on flesh and bone."

  Krakowski swung his arm properly this time and ranged the Curic-bot with the kicker, point-blank. Fountain shattered. The robot'
s chest cavity caved in and a cloud of grey dust spilled out: Constellation nanocomputers in a moon-dust substrate. Krakowski squeezed the kicker over and over, bracing himself against me, until the telepresence robot and Fountain were nothing but intermingled scrap.

  "We go," he said. We went, through galleries and galleries. Krakowski's suit, and presumably mine, went completely opaque as we approached the docking bay. We heard sounds so slow and low we felt them as emotions. The spatter of blood on the inside of my faceplate colored everything I saw.

  "I don't like this," said Krakowski. "Did you destroy the docking bay, too?"

  "I don't like you," I said.

  "Oooh, what a burn," said Krakowski.

  I hadn't destroyed the docking bay. It was still a mile in diameter and its floor was still pocked with shuttle-sized airlocks. I hadn't even touched the Constellation's huge, ugly moon-rock statues of the human couple from the Pioneer plaque. But I had given Adam and Eve some company.

  We stood in one of the bay's sixty entrances, bathed in wide-spectrum radiation. Inside, glittering dust slowly fell from the ceiling and formed three-dimensional patterns on the floor. Familiar, human patterns. Trajan's Column, slowly rendering from the bottom up as if being downloaded over a dial-up Internet connection. Eastern Central Mountain Pacific. The Stone of Tizoc. As Many Moments in an Afternoon. Spiral Jetty. Damaged Goods. The Great Sphinx and obelisks by the dozen.

  "As you can see," I said, as if I was giving that tour after all, "this bay contains humanity's really big sculptures."

  Jenny would have said it was tacky to put all these sculptures in one place. It sure didn't look like a museum. But the effect was overwhelming. Krakowski and I looked out speechless at the sculptures and the dust and the light.

  Someone had said to themselves: this idea is so important, it must be commemerated with a huge useless artifact; and they'd gone out and made that artifact, or had some slaves do it; and the artifact had survived tens or thousands of years of fame or neglect. And eventually people from other stars had come to look at it, and liked it enough to make a copy of it, for backup purposes only.

  And I, in my hubris, had taken all the biggest and best of these artifacts and restored them from backup, all in the same room. So that every time someone landed on this space station they could hear the echo of humanity shouting: how about that, you dead fucking universe? You see what I'm capable of?

  "Why are there rocks on the floor?" said Krakowski, looking down at his feet.

  "That's Spiral Jetty," I said.

  Krakowski grunted. "You say the shuttles will work?"

  "Yeah, I don't think a large earthwork is gonna interfere with the operation of your precious fuckin' spacecraft."

  "Okay!" said Krakowski. "Last leg of the journey." He pushed me along Spiral Jetty, cutting across to the waiting shuttle at its center. (I'd thought this was really clever when I designed it.) He held me tight so I couldn't use my ninja powers to backflip outside the shuttle just as the glass dome closed around us. I looked through the glass at the replicas in progress, still being laid down like lakebed sediment, layer by infintesimal layer.

  "The destination. Of this shuttle. Is Surabaya, Indonesia."

  "No, no," Krakowski told the shuttle. "We want Austin, Texas. USA."

  "The destination. Of this shuttle. Is Surabaya, Indonesia."

  "Whatever, close enough," said Krakowski. "Indonesia has an extradition treaty."

  "Don't leave!" I yelled at the shuttle. "Help! Smoke! My freedom of movement has been compromised! Take us to Farang Ring!"

  "The Constellation took Smoke out of the shuttles months ago," Krakowski chuckled. "Dumb computers don't need visas." The airlock beneath us opened and we dropped into space.

  Krakowski and I both slumped onto the floor, leaning our suits against the glass. I knew I wouldn't be getting back up. I shut my eyes.

  "Hey, I just wanted to tell you, you put up a good fight," said Krakowski, "for a wimp whose patrons are gutless pacifists. You had me worried a couple times. But it's like Fowler used to say: you don't fuck with the field agents."

  "I'm not really looking," I said, "because I don't want to throw up any more today... but I think Earth is getting smaller."

  "What the hell?" said Krakowski. He turned onto his hands and knees. "Where are we going? Away from the station, the moon, the Earth—there's nowhere else to be! Shuttle! What happened to Indonesia? Where are we going?"

  "They're not sentient anymore," I said. "Remember?"

  "You are right," said the shuttle. "Ariel. The shuttles. Are not sentient. But they are under. Computer control."

  "Are we still playing this game?" Krakowski shouted. He leapt to his feet and pointed the kicker at me.

  "Whoa whoa, man," I wheezed. "You watch too many hacker movies. You think I can take over some arbitrary computer with my mind?"

  "Then who the...?" said Krakowski, and patted his waist through his spacesuit. His phone was ringing.

  "Is that your... personal BlackBerry," I said, "or your extraordinary rendition BlackBerry?"

  "Jesus fuck!" Krakowski pinched his phone through his spacesuit and gingerly pulled it out of its holster.

  "Forgot to tie the phone into the suit, huh?"

  "Who is it?" said Krakowski, pushing his hip towards me. "Tell me! Dammit! I told them no contact until 0700!"

  The videoscreen was blurred through Krakowski's spacesuit, but I recognized the scene. I'd seen it before. It was BEA Agent Krakowski, smiling, sitting at his desk in his office back on Earth.

  "It's you," I said.

  "Surprise!" said Dana Light.

  * * *

  Chapter 35: The Unilateral Extradition Expedition Solution

  Real life, December 26, continued

  "What do you mean it's me?" said Krakowski. "Obviously it's not me. I'm here. I can't call myself on the phone."

  "It's Dana Light," I said, "pretending to be you for some unfathomable reason. Wearing your appearance like a hat."

  "Who the hell is Dana Light?" said Krakowski.

  "I'm reeeally not in the mood to explain it right now," I said.

  "The knife that cuts the rope that binds can also cut a throat," said Dana, using Krakowski's voice. "I am the hand that holds the blade. I am the bright flash out of darkness and silence. I am Dana Light, and I am ready to kill."

  "Ohfuck!" Krakowski did not appreciate this kind of talk coming from his pants. He jumped back and swatted the phone through his spacesuit like it was stinging him.

  "She's quoting a commercial for a game," I said. "It aired in 2008, some time around then. It was pretty graphic for the time; I think they only aired it on late night."

  "Dana Light is a woman?" said Krakowski.

  "Kind of," I said. "She's a Constellation AI."

  "I'm the Constellation AI who saw you tear down Ariel's house to score yourself a promotion," said Dana. "You got rid of Agent Fowler so you could take all the credit. You harassed Ariel until he moved to the space station, and then you harassed his friends while you plotted to kidnap him back and erase the black mark he'd put on your record. I've been watching you for a while, Mr. Krakowski. I don't like what I see."

  Krakowski scooted over to where I lay on the shuttle floor. "Look," he said quietly. "We're the humans, we're in this together, right?"

  "That's not how I choose sides," I said.

  "In fact," Dana continued, "nobody in the Constellation likes you. I'm just the only one who'll tell you."

  All alone, Krakowski fell back to a kind of hostage-negotiation stance. "All right," he said. He stood up again and addressed the ceiling. "Say what you have to say. I'll keep an open mind."

  "It's very simple," said Dana. "We don't like you because you don't like us. You wish the Constellation had never come to Earth."

  "Let's drill down on that here," said Krakowski. "I mean, I could have stayed at Homeland Security. You don't join the BEA because you hate extraterrestrials."

  "You are part of
an interlocking set of overlays based on coercion and violence," said Dana. "Me, Krakowski, I don't like you personally. What the rest of sentience hates is your part in this system. This parasite on your planet that wants nothing more than to hide from its neighbors. Because if only it were alone, all alone in all the universe, then when it finally extinguished itself and left Earth a broken world covered in algae, there would be no one left to see what you did!"

  "I know what you are now!" said Krakowski. He seemed almost relieved. He paced excited around the shuttle. "I wondered if I'd ever see you, or if they'd hide you behind their cute fuzzy smile my whole life. Of course there's a point where nonviolence fails. The Constellation's not stupid. You're the special forces, the black ops. The ones who protect the Constellation's highest ideals by betraying them.

  "You won't leave any witnesses, of course. Neither of us is getting out of this alive," he told me, kind of offhand. "She's surely jamming our communications."

  "I've got Outernet in my suit," I mumbled. "I just got fifty-six emails."

  "A simple shuttle malfunction!" Krakowski spat. "Just tell me: how does it feel to be a tool of hypocrites? People who preach moral superiority and keep you around to do their dirty work?"

  "I'll let the others speak to moral superiority," said Dana. "I was designed to approximate human behavior."

  "Dana," I said.

  "Hey, Ari," said Dana sweetly, using her own voice.

  "Listen. Dana. This isn't human behavior. Real people don't quote old commercials in life-or-death situations. Even an Alien wouldn't do that. It's something a fictional character would do.

  "You're not approximating human behavior anymore. You're approximating Dana Light's behavior. Problem is, Dana Light is a player character in a video game, and those people are total fucking psychopaths."

  "I'ma let you do your thing," Krakowski told me, "but this doesn't sound very promising."