Constellation Games (17 page)

"Earth would look like a big gas station to them," said Fowler. "Just like in
Triple Point
." Krakowski was gritting his teeth.

Charlene Siph—the fixer, Tetsuo had called her—was talking in split-screen on one of the muted televisions, the handicam footage looping next to her. I'd seen her look of disgust before, on Ashley's face, whenever Tetsuo pulls out his Ip Shkoy courtship techniques.

"Can we please apply any of the knowledge we've obtained up to this point?" I said. "Curic just tried to give me thirty pounds of gold! Because she forgot gold is valuable!"

Krakowski's BlackBerry beeped. He pulled it out of his belt holster.

"Oh-kay," he said in exasperation. "We've gone to Code Falcon, have a nice day." Fowler stiffened and leapt to his feet. Krakowski tossed the BlackBerry onto the table, then immediately picked it back up and slipped it back in its holster.

"What's Code Falcon?" I asked.

"You're not cleared," said Krakowski. "That's why we use codes. But here's a tip: Let's get the hell away from the landing site."

I sat in the back of the government-issue sedan. Story of my life: me in the back seat with no one to make out with. BEA Agent Fowler sat in the driver's seat, revving the biodiesel engine like he wanted to NASCAR this fucker. BEA Agent Krakowski was still in the debriefing trailer.

The car smelled like french fries. I pulled out my phone and called Jenny, cooling her heels fifty yards away in the spaceport waiting room.

"Are you done?" she asked.

"Get out of here," I said. "The spooks are spooked. They're evacuating me. Tell everyone in there to get out."

"The only people in here are the TSA dudes," said Jenny. "If I tell them to abandon their checkpoint, they'll summarily execute me. Is this about the Antarctica thing?"

"It's pretty damn likely," I said.

Fowler twisted to face me. "Get off the
phone
, Blum," he said. "This is still a secured area."

"Shit," I said. I put the phone in my pocket but didn't hang up.

Fowler leaned forward, trying to see through the smudged windshield into the trailer. "He's probably screwing around with the document safe," he said.

A distant whine harmonized with the sedan's engine. A reentry sort of whine. "Well, shit," said Fowler, "here it comes. If we die, it's because Krakowski had to put those damn xenobiology reports back in the safe."

"Are we going to die?"

"I. Don't. Know. Blum. We're finally standing up to the Constellation on something big. So maybe instead of dropping a civilian shuttle every forty-five minutes, they've decided to drop some hardware. Armored personnel carriers, or big-ass rocks."

"Have you ever
seen
a Constellation APC? Or a soldier? Or a cop? Because I just got back from a week with the fucking space hippies."

"'Scuse me," said Fowler. He ran into the BEA trailer, leaving the key in the ignition. I leaned forward and shut his door. I could see a shape in the sky. It was a shuttle, like the shuttle I'd just come down in. The shuttle landed. It was empty.

"It's just a shuttle!" I yelled at the trailer, as if they could hear me. I took the phone out of my pocket. "Jenny, you still there?"

"I'm on the bike. Getting out of here, as per your request."

"Do you know anything about the Antarctica situation?" I said. "These guys won't say anything but code names."

Jenny puffed. "Well, according to the ever-reliable television, there's this group called 'Save Humanity'."

"It's 'Save the Humans'," I said. "That's Curic's overlay."

"Yeah, no kidding. Apparently some of them decided to move the ice caps to the moon where they wouldn't melt. Step two, we find out about this. Step three..."

"We all go apeshit. Sorry, they're coming back." Phone back in pocket.

"Jayzus Christ," said Fowler, getting in and slamming the door. "We don't control our own airspace anymore." The shuttle took off, empty. "It's like living in a third world country."

Krakowski got in the passenger side. "Let's go downtown for a few hours," he said. Fowler started the first two points of what would prove to be a five-point turn.

"Do we have to, like, right now?" I said. My bike was locked up in the parking lot. "They just had their chance to drop an APC on us, and they blew it. It's the same shuttle I came in on."

"Yes, we have to," said Krakowski. "We haven't finished the debriefing, and I don't want to explain to the spooks why I kept a civilian at a Constellation landing site during a Code Falcon." Who's so spooky that
Krakowski
calls them "the spooks"?

"It's one-thirty," said Fowler. He pulled onto the highway. "And my food's back in the fridge. Let's get some lunch."

"Does the Xico's near the capitol still have those secure booths?"

"I never went there," said Fowler. "Back in the day, my bros and me always hit Best Little Steakhouse." Yes, he said "bros".

"Fowler, you're fucking useless," said Krakowski.

"You're going to debrief me in a chain restaurant?" I said.

"You got a better idea?" said Krakowski.

"Can we do someplace local, like Moe's?"

"Xico's it is," said Fowler.

At the fucking Xico's, with knife and fork, Krakowski carved his burrito into a grid and began eating it from the origin point.

"She said they weren't having any luck going through the political process," I said. "Everyone's all 'not in my backyard, not in my backyard.' So I guess they took their show on the road to Antarctica."

"Are you kidding me?" said Fowler. "Curic is mixed up in this? And you knew this four days ago?"

"I posted it to my blog," I said, "four days ago."

"Man, you think we can read gaming blogs at work?" said Krakowski. His burrito grid 2C had some gristle in it and had to be timeboxed into smaller tasks. "We need email."

Over the course of a disgusting lunch, I carefully recounted every single blog post I'd posted from space. Afterwards, Krakowski and Fowler dropped me off at my house.

"Are you still there?" I asked my phone, but Jenny had hung up almost two hours earlier. I called her back, voice, and let it ring while I fumbled for the house key.

"Yo."

"I'm going to open a bottle of wine," I said, "and then I'm going to drink half of it. Do you want to come over and have the other half?" My house smelled like apples.

"I'm in the middle of a really epic flamewar," said Jenny.

"Is it about what just happened with the Constellation?" I found the apples, in the kitchen, rotting in the fruit bowl.

"It's about comics," said Jenny. "But it will probably go in that direction eventually. Don't drink the wine. You can get drunk at your welcome-back party."

I pulled the wine out of the fridge anyway. "Are we still doing that?"

"You're back, aren't you?" said Jenny. "At the Belt, once Bai gets off work."

I yanked open a drawer to look for the corkscrew. "Geez, can it not be the Belt? That's where white guys take their Asian girlfriends."

"Don't be a racist. How is that even a complaint?"

"It's just a cliche, that's all. I don't have my bike. Who else is coming?"

"Uh, you, me, Bai, Bizarro Kate and Martin. And presumably Dana, if you want to count her."

"I'll think about it," I said. I jammed the corkscrew into the wine bottle.

Once Jenny hung up, I turned on the TV like I was sneaking a cigarette. Four hours later and Charlene Siph was still on, eyes rapidly nictating from exhaustion, sharing a screen with an anchor.

"I sure can, Susan," said Siph, "There was no authorization because there's no one to do the authorizing. I don't sit on my haunches all day telling people what to do, pardon my French. On my home planet, we have a saying—"

TV off. I tried to get online and talk to Curic, or Tetsuo, or especially Dr. Tammy Miram.

Access blocked

Access to offworld Internet sites is temporarily restricted under the terms of the CONTACT Act.

Please consult the
AT&T Terms of Service
.

I walked from room to room of my empty house, drinking from the bottle. In my bedroom, next to the piles of unexplored hardware Curic brought me during her visit to Earth, were three crates I'd never opened.

I sat on my bed. I used the corkscrew's foil cutter to unscrew the lid of one of the crates. The crate was full of tiny pellets of packing foam, which I expected. I didn't expect to find a sheet of plastic embedded in the foam, and I didn't expect to see Krakowski's face printed on the sheet in grainy greyscale.

Is this you?
This tamper-sensitive container was opened on July 20 at 14:29:05 CDT.
A product of the Tamper-Sensitive Packing Material Overlay.
(Not affiliated with the Temperature-Sensitive Packing Material Overlay.)

I closed the crate and started writing a game review. An hour later, I reopened the crate and there was another sheet of plastic inside, with my picture on it.

I kept writing.

GAME REVIEWS OF WHISPERED REVOCATIONS 2.0 PRESENTS
*
(
Schvei
)
A game by Af be Hui
Reviewed by Ariel Blum

Publisher:
Perea Corporation
Release date:
Contact event plus 41 Earth years
Platforms:
Everything Environment, The Big Tour, Absolutely More Reliable Than The Competition
ESRB rating:
AO for language, cruelty, violence, and OMG EXPLICIT SEX

Can a video game be a work of art? Eggheads have been asking this question for twenty years, even though the answer is obviously "yes". We live in a world in which any random shit can be art. Think of anything bad to say about video games and there's something worse that everyone agrees is art. Torture-wince movies are art. Commercials are art. A fire extinguisher is art, if a designated artist designates it as art.

This is how the review started when I started collating notes. That is what seemed important at the time. I was lying back against a moon-rock wall in a tiny room in Ring City's Human Ring. I typed to the tune of a beautiful woman's postcoital snoring, a sound that for obscure reasons, I have always considered a barometer of my own virility. It was four days ago.

Now I'm alone in a poorly-lit 2BR house that smells like rotten apples. I'm barred from Ring City until further notice (I was one of about 4k humans ever to go there at all) and I can't even communicate with the people who are still up there. I've sorted my music collection by lowest average pitch and am playing droning bass notes to drown out the sound of my neighbors yelling at each other. It's not even five o'clock and they're already drunk, but so am I, so why be judgemental?

I think there's supposed to be a game review in here somewhere. OK.

Like
A Tower of Sand
, Af be Hui's first interesting game,
*
is designed for two-player play. Tetsuo Milk, my guide to Af be Hui's native Ip Shkoy culture, hands me four enormous rubber-plastic gloves with embedded motion sensors. The game controllers for the Everything Environment. It is five days ago.

I point out to Tetsuo that I only have two hands, and they're half the size of his. After some spirited discussion, we decide to play
*
on a rival console that supports the old-style controls of the older console I already know how to play: the Simulates Hi-Def False Daylight.

A first-person view fades in on a dingy treehouse apartment in a polluted city, an apartment where the main source of light is the home movie projector. The player character's apartment in
*
is pretty much the same place as the replica Ip Shkoy apartment in which we are playing the game.

"Did you plan this?" I asked Tetsuo.

"I did not," said Tetsuo. "These apartments were a common visual shorthand. Like how every human sitcom fades in on a brick house in Chicago."

"I don't think that's literally true."

"And the same song plays. 'People like us belong together, but sometimes—'"

"Stop trying to sing," I said. "That's
Second Chances
. You were watching different episodes of the same sitcom."

"In my defense, I never watched the entire song."

*
is the story of Iul (full name never given), an Alien too poor to live further up the tree in good natural light, but not so poor that she would go out and buy electric "false daylight," which you do only if you're a student or otherwise too poor to care what other people think of you. Iul's apartment is the kind of place you probably live if you're an adult Ip Shkoy Alien who plays video games. It is, I realize now, the Alien equivalent of my shitty cardboard housing-bubble house in Austin.

"Walk, walk, walk," says Tetsuo. "Walkin' around." He swings Iul around and knocks over a pile of junk. (Our replica Ip Shkoy apartment is pretty tidy, but Iul's is cluttered with junk, accumulated through her job, on which more later.)

"What do I do?" I asked.

"You are also in control of Iul."

"Like
A Tower of Sand
? We trade off."

"No, simultaneously."

In
A Tower of Sand
, each player controls half of a Farang's bicameral mind, cooperating to form an integrated personality. In
*
, the players cooperate to control a single Alien with a humanish integrated mind. On the game's instructional poster, Af be Hui recommends that a man and a woman play the game together.

I don't think you should play this game with someone you want to become romantically involved with.

"Don't—a fuck! Let me control!" said Tetsuo.

"You're knocking everything over!" I jammed the movement controls to their maximum to override Tetsuo. Iul ran out her apartment door, onto the sidewalk outside, and over the railing, two hundred feet down to the forest floor. Black Pey Shkoy writing scrolled onto the screen.

"It's onomotopoeia," said Tetsuo. "Pey Shkoy for the sound you make when you fall and hit the ground."

"I didn't need the last part."

"Or when something falls on you."

"O
kay
."

"We start over."

It's not a cooperative game. Both players have the same control over Iul's movements, but we have different goals. There's a percentage dial that shifts towards me whenever Iul rebels against the norms of Ip Shkoy society. Tetsuo takes victory points away from me by having Iul conform to what society expects of her.

Iul moves and acts by two-player consensus, and both players lose if Iul dies or loses what little social status she has. The strategy is to let the other player have his way as much as possible on the little things, while trying to steer the larger storyline to your advantage.

Iul's job is a cross between insurance investigator and tech support. When something goes catastrophically wrong with your barbecue grill or treefish cage, Iul shows up, investigates the accident, and finds some way to blame it on you, so that the manufacturer doesn't have to do anything to make amends. You were holding it wrong. You exceeded the recommended voltage. If all else fails, you should have bought two.

The Pey Shkoy name of the game,
Schvei
, is the word for "hyperlink": specifically, the hyperlink to the small print. When you ride past a billboard here on Earth that says "First 30 days free!*", that asterisk lets you know whatever's on offer is booby-trapped. You'll spend the rest of the year paying out the ass for the privilege of those 30 free days. Every single manufactured object in
*
is
shveil
, right down to the floor tiles and eating utensils.

"Is this a joke?" I asked Tetsuo, who was having Iul skim the disclaimer on a sari-like wrap.

"The text of the disclaimer is satirical," said Tetsuo, "but a lot of Ip Shkoy clothing was
shveil
. These notes should be familiar to you. They were posted all over the store where you bought the game."

"I can't read Pey Shkoy," I said, "and also you yelled at me whenever I tried to look at anything in the store."

"That was not me," said Tetsuo. "It was the shopkeeper."

There are thirty investigation jobs in the game, thirty things that will happen to Iul no matter how you and your partner play. By the time I left Ring City, Tetsuo and I had played twelve of them, like a little angel and devil floating either side of Iul's head.

Except it's not clear from moment to moment who's the angel and who's the devil. Conformity means not having to do anything personally unpleasant, but it also means being a thug for a company that turns Constellation circuit diagrams into products without really knowing how electricity works. Rebellion means hurting people (the body count is very low by human-video-game standards, but you can ruin a hell of a lot of lives), but it also means carving out something for yourself in a society that doesn't give a damn about you, apart from your place in its pre-industrial accounting conventions based on time/distance/price.

Iul's eighth job takes her to a very expensive four-room apartment near the top of a neighboring tree. The tenant, a young male with more money than sense, has shorted out an expensive
chiol
synth — the post-contact Ip Shkoy equivalent of a baby grand in your Park Avenue penthouse.

Tetsuo's goal was to play it by the book: to find some evidence of instrument misuse (not too difficult considering the dumb fuck who owns the synth) and offer to settle for the instrument's salvage value. Bring it back to the manufacturer where the burnt-out electronics would be replaced and the synth resold. My goal was to bring the situation to pretty much any other outcome.

I've got a lot of experience with this, because "devil on the player character's shoulder" is the role you play in pretty much every human video game. Human player characters take whatever's not nailed down and kill anyone who stands in their way. Some Ip Shkoy games had player characters like this, though they inhabited a distinct genre, the "creep game."
*
is half a creep game. Or maybe I should say it's two people fighting over which creep game to play.

Back in the Park Avenue penthouse, I came up with a genius creep-game strategy that would never have been programmed into a human game: have Iul blackmail the rich kid for sex. This would give her various character bonuses as well as being totally unacceptable behavior. Just having Iul glance at something she shouldn't be looking at is good for a couple of points. This move, I was sure, would put me in the lead.

The best part was, I didn't have to negotiate anything with Tetsuo. I just let him handle the dialogue selections while I subtly shifted Iul's body into the Affect of Seduction (the Affect of X is a game mechanic, not a formal part of Ip Shkoy culture). I let Tetsuo play it by the book, lecturing the rich kid about maintenance schedules and the fine print on the extended warranty. Meanwhile, Iul's posture undermined everything Tetsuo was making her say, turning the argument into the start of a cheesy porno flick.

Did it work? Well, part of it worked: before long, Iul and the rich kid were going at it on top of the
chiol
synth in what can only be described as a sexually explicit minigame.

"Ugh," I said.

Tetsuo gave the pkt-pkt-pkt of an Alien laugh and shifted his grip on the controller. "Let me handle this," he said. "You'd just fuck it up." He rhythmically spun two sets of abacus beads with his primary thumbs. I guess some techniques haven't changed since Ip Shkoy times.

I glanced away from the main screen and caught a glimpse of the score dial. "What the hell? This scoring system is ridiculous. I get like two points for sexual extortion?"

"What do you mean sexual extortion?" said Tetsuo.

"You know both those words. Put them together."

"Well, what you call this extortion, the Ip Shkoy called it climbing the tree," said Tetsuo. "Social advancement. But it is considered, uh, unstylish? impolite? to do this with your customers."

"That's totally unfair. How was I supposed to know that?"

"I'm sorry that a different culture had different standards from yours."

"I feel dirty."

"It's merely an entertainment game."

There was a crash. Iul rolled onto the apartment floor, surrounded by the plastic and wooden shards of what had once been a
chiol
synth. The rich kid lay on his back, groaning.

"Oh-oh," said Tetsuo. The score dial slowly crept towards the side of rebellion, finally putting me in the lead. "You're going to win after all."

"What's that status message?" I asked.

"'Use of product inconsistent with its labeling.'"

"How did Af be Hui get away with this?" I said. "This is brutal. It's beyond satire. She's openly mocking her own company's products. Did Perea fire her?"

"Why would they do that?" said Tetsuo. "Her games attracted lots of money."

Af be Hui began adulthood as a staff musician working for the Perea Corporation. Six local years going from town to town in a traveling electronics trade fair, wearing a sexy outfit and playing arrangements of old rural songs on Perea's electronic instruments.

Perea made traditional Alien instruments with Constellation-derived synthesizer circuitry hooked into the output mechanisms. The synths were constantly breaking, even without people putting their full weight on them during sexual intercourse. From fixing and hacking the instruments on tour, Af learned enough about electronics to make a career change when Perea started making video games.

This is not a review from someone who knows how the game will end. I don't what Iul plans on doing with the electronic bits and pieces she filches from her jobs and squirrels away in her no-daylight apartment. The way things are going, I may never have a chance to play this game again. But I've played enough to feel something I don't often feel before while playing a game: complicity.

In a game where I control the player character directly, I never think of the PC as a person. The game tries to make me identify the actor in the cut scenes with the similar-looking avatar I control the rest of the time, but it never works. When the devil on the PC's shoulder makes them do something terrible, it's nothing personal. I'm just probing the game board.

In
*
, the player character
is
the game board. When I negotiate with Tetsuo to decide Iul's actions, I'm ratifying those actions. Since the axis of behavior is conformity/rebellion instead of the good/evil you see in "sophisticated" human games, I can't predict how I'm supposed to feel about what I make Iul do.
*
was the first Ip Shkoy creep game that makes you complicit with the creepy PC, instead of letting you use them as a catharsis puppet.

This is why I wrote that crap I wrote at the beginning about art. None of that seems to matter now. What I'm trying to reckon now is what
*
says about the society that produced it. I feel like I'm going through an old magazine and just looking at the ads.

*
was written sixty years after the Constellation made contact with the Aliens. This was a contact mission that went
well
. The Constellation didn't show up to a planet of mummified corpses like Gliese 777Ad, or post-apocalyptic cavemen like the Gaijin. Alien civilization didn't collapse five hundred years after contact like the Inostrantsi's did.