Alien Game

by Rod Walker

  “Do that,” said Mr. Royale. “But if you decide you’re interested,” he tapped the card, “you know how to get in touch with me.”

  Later that evening I told Uncle Morgan what had happened.

  He listened without interrupting. My uncle was a big man, both strong from work and fat from eating too much, with graying hair and beard and arms that looked like logs. He usually wore dust-stained work clothes, a can of beer in his right fist. I could remember times when I had seen him without alcohol close at hand, but maybe only a dozen times, and none since my parents had died. His nose was red from constant drinking, his eyes were bloodshot. As far as I knew, his liver hadn’t gone yet, which was just as well. If he needed a new liver, he would have to go to a Care Ministry transplant center, and he would rather die than do that.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  Uncle Morgan. “You should take the job.” He grunted and took a long drink from the can, then shook his head. “Not that I want to lose you. You’ve been useful to have around. If I had my way, I’d give the farm to you.” His mouth twisted with the old bitterness. “But the ecocrats won’t let me.”

  I said nothing. Uncle Morgan held title to the farm, our family’s legal claim to the land dating back to when the first settlers had colonized New Princeton. But the law dictated that the farm could only pass to Uncle Morgan’s children. My father had been Uncle Morgan’s younger brother and if Uncle Morgan had died first, my father would have inherited the farm, and then I would have inherited it in turn. But my parents died in a train derailment and Uncle Morgan had no children. That meant that when he died, EcoMin would claim that the land had reverted to the Acadarchy. They had been doing this sort of thing for centuries, gradually eating away at the independent farmers one by one and selling their lands to the giant agribusiness conglomerates, on the ridiculous grounds that doing so resulted in more ecologically friendly farming.

  Uncle Morgan sighed. “There’s no future for you here. You’re eighteen now, and can make your own decisions. You should start building yourself a life so you have something to fall back on when we lose the farm. Better go to the city and make your fortune there. Find a way off New Princeton if you can and head for someplace less…” He waved his hand as if trying to pluck the appropriate word out of the air. “Less ossified. With fewer bureaucrats and Ministry agents always looking over your shoulder.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “And see that you stay out of trouble,” said Uncle Morgan. “The people in the cities have no morals and no work ethic. Most of them are slugs living on Basic Income. They’re barely human these days.”

  At the time, I had no idea how right he would turn out to be. I really should have listened to Uncle Morgan.

  So I called up Mr. Royale, who was delighted with the news. A week later I took the train to Wilson City and began my career as Mr. Royale’s errand boy.

  Strangely enough, most of my errands involved fixing things. Mr. Royale had a lot of companies, but he rarely hired actual employees since the taxes were so high and the regulations were so complex. Instead, Mr. Royale hired his people as contractors and then paid them on an hourly basis. The pay, I had to admit, was pretty good, but the perks were better. Mr. Royale also paid in “favors”, which was I was able to pay fifty percent below market rent on the micro-apartment I rented, why my mass transit pass was free, and why I had a card that let me buy groceries at ten percent off.

  Which was just as well, because Mr. Royale had a lot of work for me to do.

  For some reason, he had a hard time finding competent people. Thirty million people lived in Wilson City, most of them in the endless apartment towers surrounding the downtown skyscrapers, so you’d think he could at least find someone who knew the difference between an alternator, a crankshaft, and a rotor, but there weren’t that many of them. Sure, Wilson City had a lot of schools… but the people who came out of those schools never seemed to know anything. Like, I was talking to another mechanic, a guy just out of technical school, and he knew all the EcoMin and CareMin regulations backward and forward, but while I was talking to him, I realized he wasn’t entirely sure about the difference between voltage and amperage.

  I hadn’t been to technical school, but I had spent a lot of time with my father between the various mandatory modules of school before the accident, and we had spent almost all our time fixing farm machinery. Dad had also done a sideline fixing cars, so I had spent a lot of time doing that as well. So I knew a lot of different mechanical systems well, which made fixing KwikBreet machines and Mr. Royale’s fleet of motor vehicles and cleaning robots pretty easy by comparison.

  It turned out that Mr. Royale had trouble finding skilled people because there just weren’t that many skilled people in Wilson City.

  I started to realize that after my first six weeks or so there. Most of the people I saw in Wilson City were just so… so…

  Well, to be blunt, they were obese.

  I suspected one reason Mr. Royale’s cleaning robot rental business did so well because a lot of the citizens of Wilson City were incapable of bending over without injuring themselves. Uncle Morgan had gotten heavier over the last few years, but compared to a lot of people in Wilson City, he was as thin as a whip. Weirdly, the richer people were, the more likely they were to be in shape. I don’t know why. Mr. Royale liked to say that once someone had gone on Basic Income, they had no reason to go off it again, and therefore no reason to do anything except eat, drink, vape, and watch videos until they died in their late fifties from diabetes or cirrhosis or cardiac failure, and their bodies went into the organic decompilers to become fertilizers and plastics.

  I don’t know if he was right or not, but when I went to Basic Housing blocks to repair KwikBreet machines, it seemed like everyone there was obese, even the kids. They spent all their time jacked into the Netrix, living virtual lives in the place of their real ones. Sometimes I thought I could fire a gun over their heads, and they wouldn’t notice unless they happened to lose their connection at the same time.

  I admit that sometimes I had fantasized about leaving the farm, going to one of the cities, and going on Basic Income and doing whatever I wanted, but after seeing how people in the Basic Housing blocks lived, I swore to myself that I would never, ever end up like that.

  So I worked a lot, but I never really relaxed in Wilson City. I didn’t fit in. Most of the people my age had never done an honest day’s work in their lives, and we didn’t have a lot of common ground. Plus, we didn’t have the same recreational interests. I liked to actually do things—hike and run and go exploring and a good basketball game—did know you can actually reprogram an autonomous tractor to play horse? I also liked to hunt, but you have to be careful not to let EcoMin find out, so I suppose that wasn’t hunting, technically speaking, but poaching.

  But no one in Wilson City seemed to like to do anything. They were too busy being angels or demons or vampires or pirates in their imaginary worlds. So, when I did have some down time, I mostly spent it with Mr. Royale and his various employees.

  “That is exactly the problem, Hammond,” he said when I mentioned that to him one day. “No one here likes to do anything. That’s why I’m in investing in the Safari Company. The Ecology Ministry shut down the last colonization program fifty years ago, and New Princeton has entirely stagnated since then. Man is an explorer! He is a fighter! He needs to build things, and do things, and face dangers, and run risks. He is not made to sit around and wait for cancer or diabetes to kill him off. The people here spend their lives lost in their imaginations because even make-believe challenges are better than none.”

  I agreed with him, but I didn’t know what I could do about it. Going off to start a new colony sounded like a grand adventure, but EcoMin had forbidden any of its citizens to start any such efforts, or even take part in them. It had also scaled back New Princeton’s space fleet, on the grounds that Mankind already had too much of a destructive impact on the galactic ecology
. So, even joining a scout ship’s crew and heading out on a mapping expedition on the edges of the Thousand Worlds was out. Still, I liked mechanical things, and I liked fixing mechanical things, so at least I had plenty to do.

  Nevertheless, I was feeling more than a little restless and rebellious when I met Theresa Graff for the first time.

  That turned out to be a problem.

  I had been in Wilson City for four months, and I was sent to the Central Precinct to fix several malfunctioning KwikBreet machines there. Wilson City’s Central Precinct was where all the Acadarchy’s Ministries kept their local offices, and the Care Ministry and the Ecology Ministry and the Security Ministry and the Transportation Ministry and all the other government ministries and agencies had buildings there. The larger ones had individual campuses, filled with workers, and after acquiring the contract, no doubt through calling in a few of the favors in which he traded, Mr. Royale installed dozens of KwikBreet machines all around the campuses. Of course, Ministry employees made way more money than Basic Income provided, so they demanded a larger assortment of selections, so the campus machines had more ingredients than the ones installed in the Basic Housing blocks. Consequently, the machines were more complicated, and they broke down more often. I spent a lot of time on one campus or another fixing them.

  I had gotten the first four machines fixed, and was on my way to the fifth when I met her. The machine was placed just outside EcoMin’s main office, tucked in an alcove between the doors and a towering ten-foot portrait of the current minister, a guy named Paul Valier. The portrait showed Valier wearing a double-breasted black suit as he stood before a radiant jungle, one foot resting upon a rock and one arm flung out as if presenting the jungle to the people of New Princeton. It made him look like a used-car salesman, as if he was announcing a sale on last year’s model of electric city cars.

  At that moment, however, neither the portrait nor Valier struck me as important. I was wrong about both.

  Instead, the sound of someone beating on the KwikBreet machine captured my attention.

  “Stupid machine!” shrieked a female voice. “Give me my stupid breet!” She let loose a torrent of furious words, very few of which were printable.

  “Why are you hitting my machine?” I said, hurrying forward, my tool bag in my right hand. I had visions of some four-hundred-pound diabetic driving her electric cart into the machine out of pure frustration.

  Don’t laugh. I’d seen it happen before, and it had taken all afternoon to fix the poor dispenser.

  Then the girl hitting the machine turned around, and for a moment my brain froze.

  She was, to put it mildly, hot. Hotter than a Spicy Cheese Melt fresh from the nuker.

  The sight of her hit me like a thunderbolt. You see, most of the girls I had met since coming to Wilson City were already thirty or forty pounds overweight, which effectively killed any interest I had in asking them out. Theresa, though, Theresa was in shape. She was very fond of yoga, and it showed, especially since it was a warm day and she was wearing nothing more than a tank top and shorts. She had long, thick, black hair, eyes like brilliant sapphires, and full red lips. For a moment, I had a brief vision of grabbing her, pulling her close to me, and kissing her.

  Then she started shouting at me and I had to resist the urge to run.

  “This is your machine, is it?” she said, stalking forward. She jabbed me in the chest twice with an uncomfortably sharp painted nail. “Then you had better well give me back my money! I paid for a Hummus Vegie Breet with Teriyaki, and I better get it! I…”

  I pushed past her in mid-tirade and examined the machine. Pretty or not, maximum volume or not, I had to see if she’d done my machine any damage.

  “What are you doing?” she said. I got the idea that people did not often walk past her and ignore her.

  “Seeing how much it’s going to cost you for punching my machine,” I told her.

  “What?” she said, her voice going up half an octave.

  “You were punching it,” I said. “If it’s not working, that’s probably why.”

  She folded her arms and glared at me. “Are you saying it’s my fault?”

  “It isn’t mine,” I said. “Did you really think that if you scream at it a little more, it’ll say sorry and spit out a breet at you?”

  To my surprise, she laughed. I had no idea why.

  Right there, that was my problem.

  It wasn’t that I was afraid of girls. Some of Mr. Royale’s technicians were so scared of them that they froze up whenever they tried to talk to girls. Me, that wasn’t my problem. My problem was that I wasn’t scared of them, but I didn’t understand them. You might think that isn’t a big deal, but then, think about what happens if you’re not scared of a chainsaw and you don’t understand how it works.

  See what I mean? And as girls went, Theresa was the love child of a chainsaw and a hungry shark with a bad temper.

  “Okay, maybe I overreacted a little bit,” she said. “My blood sugar is like, really low, because I just got done working out, and I was so hungry that I was angry, and I thought one of the vegetarian burritos would be good, but then the stupid machine ate my stupid money so I got really angry.”

  She somehow said all that with a single breath.

  “All right,” I said. “If you hang on, I can probably get your money back.”

  “Really?” she said. “So you can fix these things?”

  “It’s what I do,” I said.

  “Fine,” she said. “I want to watch.”

  I shrugged. “Suit yourself.” But I was kind of glad for the opportunity to show off a little.

  I unlocked the machine and spent a few moments scrutinizing the innards. Fortunately, the malfunction was a simple one—the spindle that wrapped the finished burritos in biodegradable paper had jammed. I kept telling Mr. Royale he ought to buy a better grade of paper, but he explained that saving even one-hundredth of a credit per square foot of wrapping paper added up to tens of thousands of credits per month, so that was that. I fixed the paper spool, ran a diagnostic, and closed the machine up.

  “Here you go,” I said, handing her five-credit note back. New Princeton’s paper money was ugly and garish, all bright purples and blues, and the faces upon the currency changed every year depending upon which historical figures were in political favor at the moment.

  “Hey, thanks,” she said. “So that really works now?”

  “It does,” I said. “Anyway, I’ve got to get going. Have a nice…”

  She pushed past me, her shoulder brushing against mine. “I’m still hungry. But if this eats my money again, you owe me five credits.” She fed the bill into the machine and punched in her order, and thirty seconds later it spat out a Hummus Veggie KwikBreet, complete with the teriyaki sauce option.

  Wrapped properly, I was pleased to note.

  She actually squealed in delight and picked up the burrito. “It worked!”

  “Uh, yes,” I said, edging past her towards the sidewalk. “Enjoy your meal, and…”

  “Wait.” She grabbed my left forearm. Part of my brain noted that her hand was very soft and very warm. “I’ll buy you one too. Only fair, right?”

  I had a lot of work to do. I was going to do some work on Mr. Royale’s motor pool tonight, and I always enjoyed that. I was alone in the garage at night, and I could blast the music as loud as I wanted with no one to bother me.

  On the other hand, I was hungry. And she was pretty.

  “All right,” I said. “Beef and Shroom with Brown Rice.”

  “Coming up,” she said, feeding another five-credit note into the machine, “since you did such a nice job of fixing the stupid thing.” She looked over her shoulder at me. It was a deliberately coquettish look, but she made it work. “My name is Theresa, by the way. Theresa Graff.”

  “Sam Hammond,” I said, extending my hand. She blinked in surprise. People generally didn’t shake hands in Wilson City, but the habit had been ingrained young. The
resa laughed and gave my hand a thorough, exaggerated pumping.

  “Well, it is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Sam Hammond,” she said. The KwikBreet machine produced my burrito. “Come outside and eat with me.”

  We sat side-by-side on the curb below one of the towering Ministry buildings. I told her a little about myself, but mostly I listened to her talk and talk and talk. Her mom worked for EcoMin doing some boring job in a boring office, or so she claimed. Her mother had left her father ten years ago, and she had had two stepfathers since, and I could tell she despised both of them, probably because she called the first stepfather Mr. Dumb and the second one Mr. Dumber. She also informed me that she wanted to be a veterinarian because she loved animals, a career I thought unlikely since I could just about imagine her reaction the first time she had to clean out an infection on a cow’s backside.

  In retrospect, she talked a lot of nonsense, but it wasn’t so much that I liked listening to her as I liked watching her while she talked.

  “Thanks for dinner,” I said, once she paused for breath. “I do need to get back to work.”

  “Here,” she said, thrusting her comm in my direction. “Give me your number.”

  I shrugged, entered the number, dutifully took hers in return and left. I didn’t intend to call her or text her back. She was pretty, and in really good shape, which in Wilson City was as rare as an honest Ministry employee. Yet something about her had just seemed… off. Like, she had been so angry at the KwikBreet machine, so angry that I had thought she might actually try to take a swing at me when I showed up. And she had calmed down disconcertingly fast, so fast that I wondered if something was wrong with her. I may not have had much experience with girls, and I knew women were more emotional than men… but I didn’t think they were that much more emotional.

  The entire encounter put me in an odd mood. I thought about my parents, what they had been like before the train accident. They had loved each other, as far as I could tell. I thought about what it would be like to get married… and then concluded that I wasn’t going to find a quality wife in a place like Wilson City. That, in turn, made me wonder what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I liked fixing machines, but could I do that forever?