Constellation Games (26 page)

"Are you going to be okay?" said Jenny.

"I can party all night," I said. "It's like ten in the morning for me."

"It better be friggin four-twenty a.m.," said Jenny. "You smoked all my Lone Star Diesel."

"It's a business expense," I said. "It cancels out the caffeine without making me crash."

"This it?" said the cab driver.

"Yes," said Jenny. "The one with the huge party going on. Thank you."

I got out of the cab and stared into the light from the house. My pupils lens-flared. Shadows of people clustered on the porch in a cloud of smoke.

"Is this Bai's house?" I said.

Jenny pushed me up the walk. "He's having a party."

"I can see it's a party. I'm not—" Clomp, clomp up the steps. Someone with a strange accent was saying: "Actually it's inside my body, so if it gets stolen I'm probably dead already."

I blinked in the smoke. A flash of light glazed the front windows of the house, silhouetting a huge, misshapen figure in the doorway.

"Yo, Ariel!" said Tetsuo Milk.

"Jesus Christ the great moral teacher!" I screeched. Tetsuo loomed in the doorway, the focus of everyone's attention, wearing loose Alien clothing and holding Bai's coffee cup with the biohazard symbol on it.

From inside the house I heard a grenade go off. Someone was playing a shooter—either
Temple Sphere
or one of the other Reflex games. They reuse the explosions because they think their sound assets are the fucking Wilhelm Scream, a hilarious in-joke.

"Hello, Tetsuo," said Jenny. "It's good to finally meet you. Ariel, this is Tetsuo's welcome-to-Earth party," she told me. "I told you about it approximately one dozen times."

"I think every time you reminded me, I just wrote it down in a code comment."

"Ah, and the lovely Jenny," said Tetsuo, pinching her hand carefully in what I guess was a suave gesture. "I didn't know you had a private car and driver!"

"That was a taxi," said Jenny.

"That explains why it was so ugly," said Tetsuo. "I wasn't going to say anything. Nevertheless, Bai Lifang asks me to welcome you into his home. There is sushi, potato chips, and beer inside on your left. The beer is in a box full of ice so that it will stay cold."

I noticed that Tetsuo's coffee cup was full of sushi rolls. "Can I just grab one from you?" I said. "I'm starving."

"Don't," said Tetsuo. "They're full of wasabi horseradish."

I picked up a piece. Yup, solid wasabi, packed in where the fish should be. I dropped the sushi back in the coffee cup. "You can eat that?"

"I like condiments," said Tetsuo.

"So, Tetsuo," said Jenny. "Why Austin?"

"I have friends here," said Tetsuo, "and it never gets too cold. It was also easy to obtain an employment at your alma mater."

"Did they con you into working the computer lab?" I said. "Because that's the worst job—"

"I am a lecturer," said Tetsuo with what might have been disdain. "I had a long conversation about the Ip Shkoy with some other lecturers, whichafter they gave me a teaching credential." Tetsuo took a crumpled piece of paper out of his jacket and pulled it open like a centerfold. I recognized it immediately. Jenny has a nearly identical piece of paper. I did, too, until the fucking BEA stole it.

"That's a diploma," Jenny said. "They gave you a Ph.D."

"Yes, that's what they called it," said Tetsuo.

"'Cultural Studies'," read Jenny. "You should have held out for History."

"Need food," I said. I pushed past Tetsuo into the house and filled a paper plate with the remains of the party's sushi. There was a game in progress: four-player split-screen deathmatch projected onto Bai's wall. The game was indeed
Temple Sphere
, Reflex's sci-fi first-person shooter taking place a future with evil extraterrestrial birds and without safety railings.

The living room was crowded with people I didn't know. Jenny was still outside talking to Tetsuo. In this situation, I usually squeeze up against a wall, but the walls were occupied. A good ten people were at the edges, out of the action, huddled over little pieces of paper. Smart paper.

Oh shit. Smart paper had launched and I'd missed it. I'd been heads-down coding and the platforms I'd been coding to had become obsolete. Drunk douchebags in polo shirts now had access to extraterrestrial computers. There were probably already a dozen factory towns in China churning it out for multinational OEMs.

There was something I was supposed to do in this kind of situation. Jenny had handed me a note in the car. I filled my mouth with sushi, took the note out of my pocket and read it.

You are very high. Do not panic.
Jenny

I practiced not panicking. The sushi helped. Bai himself stepped out of the kitchen, wearing a respirator and an apron, slapping white dust off his arms. Of all the people in the crowd, he pointed at me and slid over.

"Bro," he said.

"Yeah!" I said, apparently.

"You me guest room," said Bai. His polo shirt was soaked with sweat. He walked into a hallway and I followed him.

The bed in the guest room was piled high with guests' bags and purses. Stacked against the wall were a dozen wood-and-leather steamer trunks, each plastered with ancient shipping labels.

I didn't recognize the trunks. "Are these Tetsuo's?"

"Historical recreations," said Bai.

I looked closer. The shipping labels weren't ancient; they said "Constellation Shipping." I looked at Bai. "Was Tetsuo a member of Constellation Shipping?" I asked.

"Curic built the trunks," said Bai. "Tetsuo just packed them." Bai pointed to a blue plastic tub, cowering on the floor before the steamer trunks. "That's yours, also from Curic. Tetsuo asked me to make sure you picked it up."

"Great. I don't even rate a vintage
Mutant's Revenge
kids' suitcase." The blue plastic tub was clearly modeled after the Shur-plast design I used when I had a house, but instead of "SHUR-PLAST" stamped into the lid, I saw the starfield logo of the apparently-no-longer-defunct Constellation Shipping overlay. The logo I'd seen on a shipping container in Utility Ring back in July.

I pulled the top off the plastic tub. Inside were stacks of notebooks.

"Ahh—"

"Y'okay?"

I pulled a notebook off the top of the stack and opened it. It was full of notes, as notebooks will be. Data structures, engineering ethics, genetic drift, doodles, unrequited-love poetry. All of it in my handwriting.

"These are my notebooks, from college. I lost them... in the fire."

"Hey, yeah, I remember those," said Bai.

"How did Curic
get
these?" The notebooks weren't worn at all, like they were reprints, or...

"Probably that time she scanned everything in your house?" said Bai.

"Can she recreate the other things, like my Playstations? Bai, my stuff isn't gone!"

"Ask Tetsuo," said Bai. "I need to go check the oven." He shut the door quietly.

I cleared some purses off the bed—Tetsuo's bed—and sat there, finishing my pile o' sushi and flipping through brand-new copies of my eight-year-old notebooks. Guest-star doodles from younger Bai. Lots of Jenny. Sometimes she drew the first panel of a comic strip and I'd continue it with stick figures. I opened Jenny's note and smoothed it out beneath one of those comic strips.

You are very high. Do not panic.
Jenny

I heard people clapping and slipped back into the living room. Bai was saying: "—seven hundred degrees in an overclocked oven," wearing silicone gloves and cutting up a folio-sized piece of smart paper.

After some mistaken identity I was able to locate Jenny. "What's going on?" I asked her.

"Tetsuo brought down some nanotech molds that make smart paper," she said. "You make it in the oven from playground sand. It's the door prize."

The oven?
I thought.
Is this the fucking Peace Corps? Is the Constellation gonna give us little straws to purify our drinking water?
I did not say this out loud because I knew Jenny would interpret it as panicking.

"All right, bros!" said Bai. "We got eight new pieces. Anyone wants to adjourn to the study, I'll show you how to flash an OS onto the hardware."

There was a small exodus which included one of the gamers on Bai's couch. I took the empty spot, next to one of Bai's friends I've never met, and picked up a still-warm controller.

"You play?" said Bai's friend.

"Man, I worked on the
prequel
to this game," I said. No response. "Yes, I play."

Bai's friend sniffed the air around me. "Wow," he said. He was wearing—no kidding—a backwards baseball cap.

The deathmatch was my favorite
Temple Sphere
multiplayer map, the Tool of Justice munitions factory. I spawned onto a conveyor belt, atop a pile of dark matter destined to be turned into weapons. In the munitions factory, everyone spawns onto a conveyor belt. My strategy is to keep moving and trade up weapons as I go. I jumped down a level to pick up some shatter grenades from an active fabricator.

"Did you hear they cancelled
Temple Sphere 2
?" said dude. I had not heard this. I didn't bother to respond because I knew people like him will just talk over you.

"They're doing a new IP. All the maps are on Ring City." I tossed a grenade at a crate of small arms and picked a functioning needler out of the wreckage. "All the different Rings. Should be suh-weeeet."

I pictured space marines lurching in battle armor through the identical motel corridors of Human Ring. I pictured the people controlling those marines, people like dude on my left.

"I guess Alien Ring would make a good map," I said. I lifted the needler and plinked another player off his conveyor and into a fabricator. The fabricator made a
gulp
and squeezed out three-quarters of a heavy artillery piece.

"Sniper fag!" said dude. Hah!

"The whole map is on conveyors," I said. "In that context, I don't think it's fair to disparage precision shooting."

"Cocknobbler!" he suggested.
Holy shit,
I thought.
It's that guy.
"Do you play a lot of online?" I asked.

"I prefer it," said dude. "At least you can't smell the THC coming off the stoned sniper fags."

"This is for therapeutic purposes," I said. "I'm perfectly lucid." It was around this time that I fell asleep.

I woke in darkness. Before me, through vastness of space, I saw a thick crescent of light. A planet, dark green at the equator and browner towards the poles; a planet rotating in front of me, the terminator sweeping west to reveal more green and brown and the white of an enormous storm system as I lay in geosynchronous orbit. I let out a strangled scream.

"Beeee quiiiiiet!" hissed Tetsuo Milk. "Humans are sleeping."

"
I'm
a human," I croaked.

Tetsuo crawled around noisily and turned on a table lamp. I was in Bai's guest room—Tetsuo's bedroom. The bags and purses were gone from the bed, and I was lying there instead. Tetsuo held open a Gideon Bible in one forehand and a Hunter S. Thompson anthology in the other. The planet on the wall was an animated poster.

"Why did you hang up that terrifying poster?"

"It depicts where I was born," said Tetsuo. "I like to look at it."

"It's Down? The Alien homeworld?"

"We altered a planet with no history," said Tetsuo. "Let's go outside if we talk."

I was still wearing my shoes. We snuck through the living room, where a couple die-hard gamers were slumped asleep on the couch. The split-screen deathmatch was still going on: four space marines standing on conveyer belts, weapons at the ready, endlessly touring the Tool of Justice munitions factory. Every ninety seconds being dropped into fabricators, dying, and respawning.

We sat on lawn chairs on the patio and looked up at the stars. Well, I sat on a lawn chair; Tetsuo lay on the ground. "Where's your home planet up there?" I asked.

"I read that it's in the Cygnus constellation," said Tetsuo, "but I've never seen a cygnus and I can't tell the one bunch of stars from the other."

"Let me download a planetarium app," I said. "It'll show the constellations." I took out my brand-new phone and sent seventy cents to some struggling developer.

Tetsuo stopped looking at the sky and slapped his flank with his tail. "You said that you burned down your house," he said.

"Yes. Burned down. Totally accidental."

"You tried to attach a Cheb Complete Entertainment Device to the domestic alternating current."

"Totally not thinking properly."

"That's the name of the computer system in
Schvei
," said Tetsuo. "The computer that caught fire if you installed the memory container incorrectly. It was a fictional device."

"Yeah, well, someone built one," I said. "Obviously it was their idea of a sick joke."

"Yes," said Tetsuo. "Obviously."

"I got the notebooks," I said. "Thank you. I thought they were gone."

"They are indeed gone," said Tetsuo. "Curic gave you some soft-dolls to compensate. I can only apologize for the paper quality." He meant the lack of wear on the replicas.

"I made the mistake of reading through one of those notebooks," I said. "There's some really personal stuff in there. Mostly about girls I wanted to have sex with. I don't want that stuff in the Constellation's collective memory for the next billion years."

When Tetsuo responded, it was to say: "Do you remember Dieue the Four-Fisted?"

"I think I'd remember someone with that name."

"We met him not. He was an Ip Shkoy Alien. I recreated his house in July, as an immersive environment for Ip Shkoy games."

"The place with no light."

"I lack an English for this so I will say that Dieue was a 'fall guy.' Someone who cannot gain sexual achievement in normal planetary gravity. I mean, only in free-fall."

"I've had sex in free-fall," I said. You can't be too blunt with Tetsuo. "It's not worth it. The only position is the 'We Finally Got It To Work'."

"If you're a fall guy," said Tetsuo, "it's the only way to go. Dieue's apartment was stocked with appropriate films. Which doesn't make sense, now that I think it. Maybe watching the films was enough for him."

"Yeah, well, the Ip Shkoy were sex maniacs."

"By human standards, I suppose," said Tetsuo, "although I'm beginning to doubt it. But maniacs they were with strict rules about what sex is appropriate. By standards of the Ip Shkoy, Dieue's preferences were mild- to medium-sized obscene.

"But hey, nobody cares. The scans were encrypted while Dieue was alive, and now he's dead for seventeen million years. His whole civilization was dead, until we brought it back to play some games in his apartment. Now it doesn't matter what sex he liked."

"So, you won't un-scan my notebooks," I said.

"That is the last thing you want," said Tetsuo. "You would only call attention to them. And perhaps your house will burn down again." He gave me a look like he considered this a real possibility. "Then where will you be?"

"Okay," I said, "planetarium is installed." I stood on my lawn chair to turn off the porch light, then walked into the yard and held the phone to the sky to take a reading. "With my luck, Cygnus will be in the southern hemisphere."

Tetsuo didn't move off the porch. "No, here it is," I said. "Just a cross shape. They should have called it the Pterodactyl."

"Do you know what those stars look like from the other side?" said Tetsuo.

"What?"

"Nothing," said Tetsuo. "Same as this side. Stars have sentimental value only."

"What about the
name
of your
civilization
? What about the star-draw?"

"Which the star-what?"

I sat back down. "The ritual," I said, "where everyone has a coin or a rock or something, and you toss them all together to make a constellation. You and I did it with M&Ms."

"Oh," said Tetsuo. "Someone came up with that in June. I don't understand the appeal."

"Tets, you need to understand this," I said. "Humans
dream
about the stars. They've been taunting us ever since we learned to look up. Brilliant people spent their whole lives trying to figure out why they move. Humans got burned at the stake for saying that stars are stars."

"Aliens, same," said Tetsuo. "Then we went up there and found there's nothing. Nothing but algae, and fossils, and Slow People."

Wait a minute. I leaned out of my porch chair. "You know about the Slow People?"

"I know some about," said Tetsuo. "I'll talk about them in a lecture at the university. Maybe half a lecture."

"Who are they?"

"Little computer people," said Tetsuo, like he couldn't believe I found this interesting. "Like Dana Light the soft-doll girlfriend, but advanced, and faster. Big societies living on little pieces of matter in interstellar space, or next to stars."

"This might be a stupid question," I said.

"Maybe," said Tetsuo generously, "maybe not."

"They're faster than human computers?"

"Dozen-hundreds faster."

"Why are they called Slow People?"

"Because when you talk to them, all they do is complain about how slow
you
are. It's a piss. Therefore we don't talk to them often."

"Krakowski," I said, "the guy from the BEA who—well, you know Krakowski."

"I know him."

"He wants me to tell him if anyone mentions Slow People. Like, call him immediately."

"Did he tell why he cares?"

"Probably so he can dish it to his superiors and score a promotion."

"Why do his superiors care?"

"I don't know."

"I have a suppose," said Tetsuo. "They think they'll establish a new contact with the Slow People. Then they can threaten to fight us in a war." He laughed and laughed at this—it sounded like someone choking to death. "Humans and Slow People on one side, the Constellation on the other."

I shuddered. "Do the Slow People hate the Constellation?"

"The Slow People
are
the Constellation," said Tetsuo. "There's a billion Slow People for everybody who looks like me, or you, or Bob the Mzungu. We're only the skin of the mushroom."

"Then where are they? I don't see any Slow People on the contact mission. Unless Smoke qualifies."

"Why should they come? Travel is too slow, and you are too slow when they arrive. If Slow People want to meet space monsters, they can evolve a whole society of them in an afternoon. You and I are uninteresting to them. We only protect them and maintain their hardware."

"Protect them," I said. "Protect them from what?"

"You tell Krakowski," said Tetsuo. He thought about this for a moment. "Perhaps knowing this is his desire. You tell him that we protect the Slow People from Ragtime. That's the code name your bosses use. Your government."

"What's Ragtime?"

"The other thing there is, in space," said Tetsuo. "I forgot to mention it before; it's more like a star than a fossil. Yes, tell Krakowski that we protect the Slow People from Ragtime. Be sure to use their code name. It'll outcreep him."

"You're outcreeping
me
. Tell me what is Ragtime."

"Ragtime is a scavenger," said Tetsuo. "A negentropictropic matter cloud. It's hundred-percent harmless, it only eats dead things. Just, sometimes it needs some help knowing what's dead and what's Slow People. Tell him we gave it Gliese 777Ad."

"What are you saying?"

"I am saying to tell Krakowski this and watch him squirm."

And that's what I told Krakowski, over video chat. "He said to watch you squirm," I said.

"Oh, they want to make us squirm, all right," said Krakowski.

"Can you squirm just a little?"

"First they tried to scare us about global warming. Then it was the Antarctica thing. Now, if we don't shape up, civilization will collapse and Ragtime will get us. It's childish."

"Can you give me some more about Ragtime? Tetsuo just told me what to tell you."

"I bet he did." Krakowski's expression looked like he was imagining painful deaths for me and Tetsuo.

"You said there was something in this for me," I said. "I just want—"

"Yeah, get me
real
information," said Krakowski. "Nothing from Tetsuo Milk, for Christ's sake. He's yanking my chain. He thinks this is funny."