"Dana Light will shoot people and loot their bodies and not feel a thing, because all that matters to her is the mission objective. An innocent gets killed in the crossfire, that's what, ten points off her ranking? But you don't think like that, Dana. You have human in you, and you have Alien, and you have Constellation, and all those things are better. You are not Dana Light. You are better than her."
"Not much better, unfortunately," said Dana. "Oh, Krakowski: Constellation machines do have safeguards, lots of safeguards. But the safeguards only protect against accidents."
A Constellation shuttle is totally silent in normal operation. Our shuttle was making a loud hissing noise. Dana was venting our atmosphere into space.
"Hey, you dumb bitch," said Krakowski, "I'm wearing a spacesuit!"
"And that's how you'll die," said Dana. "Wearing a spacesuit."
Two kinds of death in space: the quick freeze-dried death of decompression, and the twelve-hour suffocation death. I saw myself thrown out of the shuttle into that infinite mouth. I saw me spinning and flailing and being rescued by Dana, leaving Krakowski to scream unheard and invisible in darkness, groping for his unreachable phone, squeezing his stolen grav kicker which doesn't even work in space where there's nothing to push against, that's the first thing they teach you...
Space is full of dead things: dead planets, dead civilizations, fossils and the empty places where fossils used to be. What's a couple more? For a split second, I convinced myself that death in space was so bad, there wasn't much daylight between imagining it and actually doing it. The split second was all I needed to do the only brave thing I've ever done.
I stuck my tongue through the darkened HUD and made out with my spacesuit, dismissing a series of increasingly graphic and desperate warnings. Empty. Yes. Confirm. Confirm. Confirm. Confirm. Confirm.
Bang.
"What's that explosion?" said Dana. "Nothing should be exploding."
"That was me depressurizing my suit," I said. My ears had popped painfully; I swallowed hard. "Anything you do to kill Krakowski will kill me first. So don't do it."
"I knew you'd come around," said Krakowski.
"Fuck you," I said. But the hissing had stopped.
I rested my head against the swooping glass walls of the Earth shuttle that wasn't going to Earth. The glass was cold. (A tiny proportion of) the cold of space. With dead eyes, I looked out at the stars.
The stars were moving.
Moving, forming patterns, and... chasing us, growing brighter, converging on our position.
You have 61 new messages.
You have 65 new messages.
Curic: Are you okay? Your
trajectory is odd.
How is the human who killed my
robot?
You have 67 new messages.
They weren't stars at all. They were spaceships. They grew closer and each one resolved into a clear glass shuttle like the one I'd thought I would die in. The ships caught up with our shuttle and began orbiting us like electrons around a nucleus, like an honor guard.
Inside those other shuttles were members of my fluid overlays. Some of the Raw Materials people I'd helped excavate two dozen municipal dumps. The Form and Function people who had taught me how to apply my coding skills to metafractal reduction. Some Plan C people I'd met during my project to make every Plan C member look a human in the eyes before giving up on the whole species. And some random thrill-seekers I didn't recognize. They'd come after me. Sixty-seven people from fifteen species. Sixty-seven lights in the darkness.
"This is the Save the Humans overlay," said Curic over my suit radio. "Are there any humans in there who need saving?"
Krakowski switched on his own suit mic. "Mayday! Mayday!" he said. Like it was all his idea.
"The destination. Of this shuttle. Is— Sorry about that. The destination. Of this shuttle. Is Utility Ring, Ring City."
Dana said nothing. She'd hung up the phone.
* * *
"Well, that's it," said Krakowski later, sitting on a replica of a seventeenth-century oak chair, squeezing his BlackBerry like a stress ball. "I'm royally fucked."
"Do go on," said Curic generously.
"I thought I had authorization for this op. I had nothing. Somebody gaslighted me. Impersonated me to my superiors, impersonated my superiors to me. And I think I know who it was.
"G-ddammit! I knew it was too good to be true, the way the director suddenly changed his mind about the rendition. I went off-planet on false authorization and they've cut my access. They think I've defected."
"What I said was true," said Curic. "You can stay here." She reached out a soft burnished-leather hand and touched Krakowski's shoulder, gently, with one finger, the way you might touch a really flaky biscuit. Krakowski didn't recognize the magnitude of the gesture. He brushed Curic's hand away.
"I'm clearly not going back," he said. "That's settled. Problem is, they'll come after me, and they may not be interested in explanations about psychotic AIs that live in smart paper. Their interests may lie more in the bullet-in-the-head area."
"Who's going to authorize that op?" I said.
"It will be authorized," said Krakowski. "The Constellation turns some snot-nosed programmer, big whoop. They turn a BEA agent, that's worth some serious attention. Same reason why you should never shoot a cop, by the way."
"Mr. Krakowski," said Curic. "I offer you my protection. This is a gift of a scarce resource which I tender you without obligation."
Krakowski looked at Curic like she'd just dubbed him a Knight of the Round Table. "Are you high?" he said.
"To further protect you, I will offer the same gift to anyone who comes here searching for you."
"How the hell does that protect me?" said Krakowski.
"Pay attention!" said Curic. "You can't force people to do what you want. You have to make them a better offer."
"Why are you still so G-ddamn smug?" said Krakowski. "You got lucky. If that AI hadn't ruined my life, I'd be home by now, with your pet shithead in custody."
"If, if, if," said Curic. "Your failure was overdetermined. We would have stopped you. If your authorization had been genuine, if Ariel's terraforming fractal had been better designed, if Dana had not diverted your shuttle."
"Sure," said Krakowski. "You mind telling me how? You know, for next time."
"The same way Ariel stopped Dana," said Curic. "By making ourselves into hostages you didn't want to kill. You're not a monster, sir."
"All sixty-seven of you?"
"You don't join an overlay if you're not prepared to do the work."
"Phew," said Krakowski. "Remind me never to play poker with you guys."
"It's quite simple to play poker against an opponent who never bluffs," said the tiny Farang.
After some more whining from Krakowski, which I won't recount here, I showed him how to use the repertoire, and left him alone in his medieval Chinese apartment. Curic and I walked down an infinite hallway of Indian statuary, towards an elevator.
"You're a pretty good liar, Ariel," said Curic. "Oh, I know it's not something a social scientist should admire, but some part of me really enjoys your willingness to fight dirty when your life is on the line."
"Bluffing is different from lying," I said. "If you'd ever played any poker, you'd know that."
"Why would I have ever played poker?" said Curic. "Humans only play for money."
"Where's the port?" I said. "Where is it really?"
"You really don't know," she said quietly. "Because you were bluffing. I see! Well, it is deep down in the ocean. You got that part right. But it's not draining anything. Constellation Shipping simply doesn't need it right now. We've completed our deliveries."
"And where's Dana?"
"She could have been anywhere," said Curic. "Fortunately, we found her folded up in Mr. Krakowski's operational fanny-pack. She must have disguised herself as a very interesting piece of paper. An arrest warrant, or an incriminating letter from you to Mr.
Bai."
"Was he carrying around any other letters from me?" I asked.
"No," said Curic. We passed two flanking lines of nearly identical statues, and I made a mental note to sort them for more variety.
"Oh, you meant, where is Dana now," said Curic. "She's been merged back into Smoke for personality rehabilitation. It should only take a few hours."
"A few hours?"
"Are you upset because it seems too long, or too short?"
"It's a little short."
"Dana is a Slow Person," said Curic. "She can be overclocked. The elapsed subjective time will be several years. Keep that in mind, if you want to talk to her afterwards."
"What is Smoke doing to her?"
"She's been put into an environment where she can come to terms with her antisocial tendencies without hurting anyone. I've heard you call it a sandbox game."
"So she's right back in Dana Light Is: Unauthorized."
"Yes, except that this game cannot be won by an unhealthy mind. Eventually she'll get bored. Slow People bore very easily. She'll modify her own personality and come out happier."
I stopped walking. "Isn't that a little... coercive?"
"Certainly not. Dana wants to hurt people, so we're letting her hurt people. When she wants to stop, she can stop."
"What if she never gets bored with it?"
"Then she's not really sentient," said Curic. "She'll become part of Smoke's subconscious, and she'll be happy in the sandbox forever. That seems like the most likely result, I'm afraid. I don't see how she could have achieved the level of intelligence you and Krakowski credit her with, unless her environment contained a memetic bootstrapper."
"It's the power of love, Curic," I said. "You didn't count on that, did you? Dana and Bai loved each other. At least at the start."
"Could be, could be," said Curic. "It wouldn't be the first time the power of love was responsible for a whole lot of bullshit."
"Love is important!" I retorted. "Just not to Farang. Don't dis an emotion you're incapable of feeling."
Curic looked up at me. Her antennacles clenched and unclenched.
"Love is the emotion I feel towards my crossself," she said. And she kept walking, down the infinite hallway.
That was two days ago. I didn't post and I won't post about this on my blog, because a) I try to keep the blog pretty light, which precludes writing about almost getting killed, and b) it would blow the cover story Krakowski eventually decided on: that he had a nervous breakdown and would really like to come back to work once he feels better.
Two days, and Dana's still in the sandbox. What if everything she said and did was a trick, a social hack to move some internal dial? What does that say about the way she came on to me, and the way I eventually responded? Another reason why I'm not writing this for a blog post.
Instead, I'm writing it for you.
The first time I came to Ring City, as we were wrapping up our Af be Hui game festival, Tetsuo told me about a 3D video that Af be Hui had recorded just before she died, a few hundred years before the reinvention of uploading meant Aliens stopped dying. This was a video intended for us, the people down the line. I asked to see it.
Here it is: Af be Hui is dying in a spacious house, one huge room full of daylight. True daylight. Stuffed in shelves and dangling from the ceiling are souvenirs of a long life: archaic computers like the ones I tried to save from landfills; uneaten award-food; the preserved shell fragments of her great-great-grandchildren. Outside, the equatorial cma forest stretches to the horizon. Af be Hui has made it to the top of the tree.
When the video begins, she is looking out her windows. You don't see her in the video: the cameras are mounted around her eyespots. It's a first-person view, of sorts.
"Four days after contact," she says in Pey Shkoy, "I tore my shell and breathed for the first time. I never saw an empty sky." Her voice is strong and it is shaking. Tetsuo translates and thankfully does not do the voice.
The video is two hours long. She tells me about her friends and her rivals, Constellation and Alien. She shows me projects I don't understand and that she won't live to complete. She's very careful with everything she touches—you can tell she used to be a repair technician. And then she goes back to the window, so you can see her face reflected, and she says goodbye.
My name is Ariel Blum and I was born twenty-eight years before contact. When Tetsuo told me about this movie, I thought: I will learn the Management Secrets of Af be Hui. If I could just attend her Wealth Seminar, I can learn how she went from hack programmer to Artistic Visionary!
Of course, there was no Wealth Seminar. It was just someone from another planet, passing the time telling me about what happened when monsters from space visited her planet. Thousands of Aliens made these films—written records, too. It's what we do to be remembered when we can't upload. Thousands of records, and I chose the one made by someone who made some video games I liked. If Af be Hui hadn't already made a connection to me with * and The Long Way Around, I wouldn't have known her from Canadian Adam.
I have a new project. I'm going to attach this unpublishable post to my post-contact blog archives. I may have to reconstruct some things I didn't blog at the time or that I did blog but lied about, but whatever. I'll encrypt everything using a fate-lock with a half-life of seventy years. It'll be published then, once my personal drama no longer matters, one way or the other.
And once I fix my botched re-terraforming of Human Ring, I'm going to finish Sayable Spice: Earth Remix. The story of my life since contact will be the making-of for this game. You'll have the game, and a reason to remember the people who made it: me and Jenny and Dana.
So, contactees of the future: when the humans come to your world in fancy ships, when they give themselves names you can pronounce and put prosthetics in their mouths so they can speak your languages, ask for the Constellation Database of Electronic Games of a Certain Complexity. Play our games and read our stories, and know that when we were in your position, we did nothing but fuck this up from beginning to end. And it probably turned out okay.
* * *
Chapter 36: Protector of Earth
Private email, sent December 28
From: Public Affairs Office, Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs
To: Ariel Blum
Subject: Reminder: CONTACT audit January 4
Mr. Ariel Blum,
This is an automated reminder that your initial CONTACT audit is scheduled for 1:30 PM on Monday, January 4, at the following location:
B.E.A. FIELD OFFICE AUSTIN
2112 NOPALES DR.
AUSTIN, TX 78757
As mandated by the CONTACT act, all American persons registered as hosts or sponsors for Constellation citizens must undergo an in-person audit within eight months of their first physical contact, and again every six months thereafter. The audit is an informal, one-on-one conversation held under penalty of perjury, focusing on the registered person's recent interactions with their contact(s), as well as topics of current general interest. All information divulged during a CONTACT audit is kept confidential.
Although it may seem inconvenient, your CONTACT audit is among the most important steps you as an individual citizen can take to maintain good relations between Earth and the Constellation. Failure to report for a scheduled CONTACT audit is a crime, punishable by six (6) months in jail and/or a $1000 fine.
In most cases, CONTACT audits will take only five to ten minutes. However, since your audit is among the first to be processed by this office, you should allow for extra time. Unless otherwise informed, you do not need to bring any documentation or supplemental material.
Please do not reply to this automated message. To reschedule your appointment, or to request the presence of a Constellation observer during your audit, please call the location listed above.
Private email, sent October 19, decrypted December 29
From: Ariel Blum
To: Jenny Gallegos
Subject: Do not
open until...
Jenny,
If you're reading this you found the encryption passphrase I hid in your Christmas stocking. Yay, you. I need to tell someone a secret and I know you probably won't listen, but you're the only person I can tell who might listen. And maybe it would be better for everyone if you didn't listen after all.
Anyway, I recently spent twenty-five hours sitting at the bottom of a crater on the moon, doing absolutely fucking nothing. The reasons for this don't reflect well on me, and I don't recommend that anyone else try it, but the experience pushed me into a silence and stillness, and even a kind of calm, that has been missing from my life. And in this calm I was able to puzzle out some things that have been bothering me.
If you're still following my blog, you saw me write about FERNs, the big unfolding treelike things that the Gaijin are using to terraform Mars. Well, I was writing that post from the moon and I thought "You know, these are effectively carbon sinks. We should use them on Earth, to counteract global warming." Well, it turns out we *do* have them on Earth, except they don't look like trees. They look like shipping containers.
I can see them on Constellation satellite imagery, little pinpoints on the chemical concentration maps. Slowly reproducing themselves, fanning out from the Gulf of Mexico. Within a couple years, they'll start showing up on human satellite imagery. They're being introduced through the port that Curic brought to my house and allowed the BEA to think I'd kept.
(I took the fall for that port, without knowing why, and in exchange, Curic offered me her protection. I don't really trust Curic, and I don't know how far her "protection" goes, but it's gone pretty far already, and I definitely trust her more than I do the federal fucking government.)
Shipping companies lose thousands of containers every year. The empty ones fill with seawater and sink. If you wanted to introduce a bunch of carbon sinks into an ecosystem, and the panicky natives had just shouted down your previous attempt at un-ruining their planet, you could do a lot worse than disguising the carbon sinks as containers. Especially if you had Curic's sense of humor. The containers are soft-dolls, fake replicas, just like the you-know-whats that are really a you-know-what, which I assume you put somewhere safe because you didn't mention it when I called you yesterday.
Constellation Games Page 38