Constellation Games (23 page)

"Are you blaming the collapse of civilization on addictive video games?" I said.

"I don't lay blame," said Her. "I'm too old and too complicit. But if human psychology is similar to that of the Inostrantsi, then the Plan C overlay is correct. We need to send for help before it's too late. I hope I'm not boring you, Ariel. I do despise being dull."

"What do you want me to do? Make better games?"

"I'd value your opinion," said Her. "If we reopen a port back to Constellation space, your civilization will suffer enormous culture shock. Instead of a few million scientists and adventurer-seekers, you will have unmediated interactions with a thriving civilization of trillions of people. This hasn't worked out well in the past."

I thought of the hippie with the walking stick, the day Jenny and I tried to go to see the shuttles land. Telling us we'd live to see the end of the human race. This was the kind of thing he was talking about.

"On the other hand," said Her, "it would give you a chance to see what we've been able to build over the last eight hundred million years. The only stable multistellar civilization in the known galaxy."

Now I thought of visiting other planets. I thought of Tammy giving up her ridiculous promise and coming with me to Tetsuo's homeworld, walking with me through a real
cma
jungle.

"That's such crap," chirped the trilobite in my shirt pocket, breaking the spell. "Absolute byproduct. We might as well start from scratch with the dolphins."

"You callous swab," said another trilobite. "Open a port. Resettle them before the collapse. Move them to an Earthlike planet for a few generations."

"Yeah, another planet for them to shit all over!"

"Your, uh, members are talking back at you," I told Her.

"That's their right," said Her. "They're young, they have their own priorities. I'm the superorganism, I'm the oldest, and I've played this game one million times before. Ten thousand contact missions, ten thousand fossilized planets, twenty-four successes. And now, you.

"I'm tired, Ariel. The task I've chosen is infinite and hopeless. I'm tired of dealing with slow people, and I'm sick of cleaning up dead bodies."

"I can't make this decision!" I said. "I can't speak for humanity. There needs to be some kind of fucking... referendum."

"You've been very helpful," said Her. "I don't see much downside to Plan C's idea. If things improve here, we can always collapse the port before it reaches Constellation space. It may be the best solution."

"You're fooling yourself," said one of Them.

"Lying to yourself," said another.

"Lying to him," said a third.

"I guess I gotta ask," I said. "Are you lying to me?"

"No," said Them. "Yes." "No." "No." "I don't know." "I wish I were."

"Majority rules," said Her. "I'm not lying. I'm also leaning strongly towards joining Plan C. Save the Humans has little to offer but hope. You, Ariel, may well live long enough to understand that hope is a luxury of the young."

"I'm not very good at office politics," I said, "but that sounds like a threat."

"I never threaten anyone but myself," said Her. "Goodbye, Ariel. It was nice talking to you."

The trilobites dropped off my body like they'd been hit with a can of insecticide. They scurried back into their white wooden nest, squeaking and bitching at each other in high-pitched National Public Radio voices. At once the room was still. Her was gone.

I sat lightly in the cafeteria chair, eyes closed, breathing quietly. My T-shirt was pilled by endless tiny claws.

I cried for five minutes in revulsion and shame and then I stood up shaking. I carefully tipped the chair on its side and walked out of Her nest room into the vast cramped emptiness of Human Ring.

Curic was nowhere to be seen. Next to the port she'd set up, two Aliens cuddled asleep on the floor. They wore human-style clothes tailored for Alien bodies. The one in the four-legged tuxedo was Tetsuo Milk; I assumed the larger one was Ashley.

Tetsuo lifted his head and swiveled his tongue in the Alien equivalent of a smile. "Ariel!" he said. "I outcamped to see you before you left. I want to introduce you to my wife, Daisy Cept."

"Hi, I'm Daisy!" said Daisy. "I work with dolphins." She lifted a forehand to shake, like a dog does. She wore a long golden qibao decorated with embroidered pineapples and other Earth fruits.

G-ddammit! "Uh, Tets, a word in your ear?" I said.

"Which word?"

"C'mere." I beckoned him over. "What the fuck, man? What happened to Ashley? You were good for each other."

"Ashley and I, we... I don't think there is a word for it in English."

"You broke up?"

"Ah, you do have a word for it!"

"You've recovered quickly!" You fucking cad.

"Recovered from what? It's only until the eggs hatch."

The shot of anger burned out of my system and I realized there was none left in the bottle. I shook my head. "Maybe we
don't
have a word for this," I said.

"Are you okay?"

"Never been worse. It's fuck-thirty in the morning and Her just creeped me to death."

"She said something to outcreep you?"

"She
is
something to outcreep me." I rubbed my red eyes. "Congrats on the... eggs," I said. "Are you going back to Constellation space once they reopen the port? This station's no place to raise kids."

Tetsuo's face had an expression I couldn't read. "I'm coming to
Earth
," he said. "The children will follow. Who says anyone is reopening a port?"

"Plan C," I said. "That's what I was talking about with Her. It kind of sounds like a done deal."

"My haunches!" said Tetsuo.

"Doublepuke!" said Daisy. "That's dolphin swearing."

"Plan C are cowards," said Tetsuo. "They want to quit the game because they can't beat the first level."

"Well, they just won the argument," I said. "Her seems like a hell of a swing vote. Even Curic has switched sides."

"That supposes to me as unlikely," said Tetsuo.

"Well, maybe you should find Curic and ask her," I said. "Where did she go, anyway? Am I just supposed to go back home through the port?"

"Go not!" said Tetsuo. "Ashley is using lies to distract Curic, so that you can spend more time here."

I shook my head. "Okay, why?"

"Because humans and Aliens have something in common," Daisy said. "Something that dolphins and Farang don't think is important."

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Much bigger than Curic's hand, but much smaller than Tetsuo's. About, yes, the same size as a normal human hand. I turned around and there was a human behind me. A blonde human in a tattered NASA flight suit covered with little fluid-overlay patches.

"Hey," said Dr. Tammy Miram with a smile. She put her normal-sized human hands around my waist.

"Sexual pair bonding!" said Tetsuo.

"Thank you, Tetsuo, we get it," said Tammy. I put my hands on her hips and right on the verge of her left hip, I saw a brand new overlay patch sewed to her suit: the planet Mars, slowly rotating in front of a starfield. The starfield that Tammy had created; her and the other astronauts and the Gaijin and the camera operators with their glowing discs, in that video I'd watched over and over again.

"I have to be back in Gaijin Ring in twelve minutes," she said. "And you need to be back on Earth right now."

I kissed her. "I don't know if we can get the whole experience in just twelve minutes," I said.

"You stop talking now," said Dr. Miram. She pulled me through a dilating door into an anonymous Human Ring apartment, furnished with a shower/sink and a squat toilet and a bunkbed.

"Niceta meetcha," Daisy called out to me.

"See you soon," said Tetsuo.

A couple days after this, as you'll see, my life was run through the industrial pulper. All through that experience I was grateful, and despite everything that's happened since I'm still grateful, for the overlay patch that Tammy stuck onto me with a safety pin before I went back to Earth. I used to pull it out of my pocket all the time just to look at it.

It wasn't animated. It didn't have any text or even a full starfield. It was just two stars shining on a black background: a binary system. The simplest possible constellation. Her and me.

GAME REVIEWS OF GAME REVIEWS OF 2.0 PRESENTS
Legend of the Bystander
(c. 40 million years ago)
A game by Clan Interference
Reviewed by Ariel Blum

Publisher:
Clan Interference
Platform:
Brain Embryo
ESRB Rating:
T for cartoon existentialism

Today is a light work day. Svetlana and I are taking a break from
Sayable Spice
to take a look at some of Clan Interference's later games. I would love to be able to design games like Clan Interference did, because these guys were motherfucking insane. First they broke the taboo against socializing with other Farang in
Sayable Spice
, and then in
Legend of the Bystander
they took on the entire concept of Farang literature.

LotB
is a blob of historical-fiction vignettes that retell scenes from the Consensus Mythos shared by all Edink-speaking Farang. Clan Interference has created playable versions of all your favorite Mythos stories: the tragic Ambivalence Of King Hzme (well, they didn't have kings, but whatever); the thrilling story of the Island That Was Really A Monster With Other Monsters Living On Top; and everyone's favorite, the Raid On Offshore Loop Platform #6.

I set the pirate-cart settings and turned on the Brain Embryo to the usual crisp visuals and dead silence. "Why don't any of these games have music? It's creepy. We need some hair-metal theme songs. 'By-standah! Duh-nuh-
nuh
-nuh legend of the... by-standah!'"

"There's plenty of noise in the RF," said Svetlana, pulling off her headphones. "But you wouldn't want to hear it."

I started the game. "Oh, look," I said. "What a surprise. I'm a Farang on a beach in a bottom-up perspective." Forty to fifty percent of Brain Embryo games begin on a beach. (About twenty percent
never leave
the beach.) After the weird inside-the-brain setting of
Sayable Spice
, Clan Interference was following up with an aggressively traditional presentation.

Except that my player character was surrounded by ten Farang NPCs, milling around the beach. Not quite the twenty you see in the first
Sayable Spice
flashback, but a freaking army by Dhihe Coastal Coalition standards, considering a clan is four to seven individuals.

Svetlana skimmed the game's metadata screen. "This is the Kveh Beach," she said. "There are nine loop platforms offshore. Under cover of fog, these soldiers are going to attack number six."

"Why?" I said.

"It's assumed that we already know why," said Svetlana.

"So I'm a soldier," I said.

"You are the Bystander," said Svetlana. "As in, The, Legend Of."

"What am I s'posed to do?"

"Anything you want," she said, "as long as you don't change the outcome of the raid."

I dove my player character into the ocean and fed on some nearby sea grass. "What do I not have to change? What was the outcome of the raid?"

"It didn't really happen," said Svetlana. "It's a consensus myth."

"I mean what 'really' happened, in the myth?"

"I have no idea," said Svetlana. "Play it and find out. I imagine the ten people on the beach will slaughter the four on the loop platform. And then we'll all learn a valuable lesson about the maximum size of a clan."

"Why can't I stop the raid?"

"Because it's canon."

"Fuck canon," I said. I picked up an algae-covered rock and smacked one of the soldiers with it. He/she dissolved in a cloud of blood and two-dimensional polygons. The screen filled with a small symbol-graph in a large font.

"'You stop looking,'" translated Svetlana. "Similar sentiments in the RF."

"That's starting to look familiar," I said.
You stop looking
is the Farang equivalent of
Game Over
.

I power-cycled the Brain Embryo. "Here's a pro tip," said Svetlana. "The goal is to change as much as you can without altering the story."

"And people bought this game where you can't change the story?"

"Not 'bought' in a capitalist sense," said Svetlana. "It's a political statement against the Consensus Mythos."

"What's wrong with the Mythos? It sounds like the Greek myths. Who cares?"

"The Dhihe only told stories within the framework of the Consensus Mythos," said Svetlana. "They had two mental categories: the Mythos and reality."

"What about
Sayable Spice
?"

"Mythos," said Svetlana. "Modern day. Long after the Loop Platform #6 incident. You can add new characters, but you can't change Mythos events. Everyone's a bystander."

Back in the game, my Farang stood around and waited out the clock, a perfect little Bystander. Eventually the soldiers swam out to the loop platforms, leaving me alone on the beach.

You can't stop the raid and you can't even join it. You can tag along and watch the polygonic gore, or you can run out the clock standing-by on the beach. This is the most realistic sandbox game I've ever played: you can do whatever you want, but it won't change a damn thing.

After the timer runs out on the raid, you move on to level two, the Ambivalence Of King Hzme, which is a little more interesting. King Hzme runs a factory (I told you they didn't really have kings). Every morning, like humanity's Old King Cole, he calls for his pipe and he calls for his bowl and he calls for his factory employees three. The factory employees, in turn, tool up to produce decorative screens and room-dividers for use in the home.

But when the sun goes down, King Hzme becomes Queen Hzme, and
she
tells the night shift (the crossselves of the day shift) to start producing pre-cast concrete parts aimed towards the construction market. And before they can get anything done, King Hzme comes back, and you get the picture. Back and forth they go, always tooling up to produce one thing or another and never making anything.

It's a tragedy about which you can do nothing because you don't play as King/Queen Hzme. Nor do you play the mental health inspector who eventually shuts down his/her factory. You play one of the fucking factory employees. You can do your job, or not; it doesn't matter because any work you do will be torn down by the other shift. It's a great metaphor for the game as a whole.

Svetlana sez: "Nobody thought those things really happened. The Mythos was just a way to build an industrial society out of people who hate being near each other." And I guess it worked. Nobody wants to end up like King Hzme or the poor butchered bastards on Offshore Loop Platform #6. But the cost was a prohibition against telling stories that couldn't fit into the Mythos, stories that might have different morals.

That prohibition fell apart once the Dhihe Coastal Coalition invented electronic simulations. Now they had a medium based around feedback and machine-enforced rules, not static storytelling or social acting. You could run a story ten times and get ten different results, just like plugging different numbers into a spreadsheet.

Clan Interference pushed this idea hard. The playable flashbacks in
Sayable Spice
let you change events that have "already happened."
Legend of the Bystander
gets you as close as you could possibly get to altering Mythos events. And then Clan Interference stopped making this kind of game. Their later games,
Double Attack
and so on, have uniformly good CDBOEGOACC ratings. Nice single-peak histograms, like you'd see in a human game magazine. No more controversy.

The CDBOEGOACC doesn't say why this happened, and doesn't even seem to notice that it did. Maybe someone told Clan Interference to stop. Maybe their big creative quit or died. Maybe another game-design clan went Offshore Loop Platform #6 on their asses and took their name. Or maybe Clan Interference themselves weren't comfortable pushing this idea any further than
Legend of the Bystander
. They'd invented fiction, and they couldn't figure out what to do with it.