Constellation Games (4 page)

I'm in the airport now, waiting for my flight. L. and the other Brazilians are seeding the Constellation Database of Electronic Games of a Certain Complexity, so if you want a copy, just queue it up.

I'm writing code again, and now it's the code I want to write: code that goes into a database of alien secrets and finds the parts that are worth translating.

ABlum:
how many games are we talking about here?
Curic:
Well, the concept of an individual
"game" is somewhat fuzzy, but:
More than a million games and less than ten million.
Enough for you to spend your life examining.
Though I do not recommend spending so much time on
something already so well catalogued.

My first set of filters on CDBOEGOACC found a Farang console that was very popular about ninety million years ago. Curic translated its name as the Brain Embryo. Farang are enough like humans that I should be physically able to play the games. Even though Curic says she's never heard of this game system, or even this period of her species' history, I feel safer starting with a Farang system.

I've kept my promise to Jenny to stop watching TV, but it's inescapable in the airport, and what is on now is not so bad. I'm watching a camera crew near the lunar north pole. Humans in ESA space suits are setting up Quonset huts at the lunar north pole, on the Peaks of Eternal Light. ETs in much cooler-shaped spacesuits are replacing the solar panels with photosynthesis paint.

A few months after I started contracting with the pony game company, I asked Zhenya how he felt about Glavnaya. He said that it was abandoned before he was born, and that building it had bankrupted his country, so basically he could take it or leave it.

And, okay, but given that it happened, given that the money was spent. Don't you want an affinity with the person who pointed at the moon globe and said, "We'll build it here, where the solar radiation is the most consistent, in the Peaks of Eternal Light." When the aliens come and say "Yes, this was a pretty good place to build it, let us help you live here again."

?

Miscellaneous metadata mysteries from the Constellation Database of Electronic Games of a Certain Complexity:

1. Why are there so many Alien clones of Farang games? How did this happen?
   
2. Most species disappear from the CDBOEGOACC when their computers exceed A Certain Complexity. If humans were in the database, our last entry would probably be a handheld system from 2006. So, why do the Inostrantsi stop developing CDBOEGOACC computers, start making them again ten thousand years later, and then stop again? Retro revival, or dark age?
   
3. What's the Other game that's so awesome the Others cloned it three thousand times?
   

Last night Curic dropped the Brain Embryo right into my backyard, scattering my prized pyramid of empty beer cans to the four winds. This morning some fucker with a op-ed guest spot is telling us we should be grateful the Constellation isn't dropping rocks on us, a la
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
(not mentioned by name). Well, I am grateful Curic didn't drop a rock on my house, but hopefully the survival of the human race is not going to come down to that kind of gratitude, because there's not a damn thing op-ed guy can do about it.

Jenny came over in the afternoon once it became clear the drop was really going to happen. We hung out and she did work for a few hours, and Bai came over from the turbine plant as soon as he got off work.

"Hey, bro!" he said, and held up a six-pack of convenience store beer, his traditional game night gift. "Did I miss the drop?"

Jenny was shuffling cards. "You missed squat," she said. Bai toted the six-pack through the living room into the kichen.

"Curic only delivers after dark," I said, "so that violent gangs don't notice the drop and steal the loot from us."

"This is Austin," Bai called from inside the fridge door. "Not São Paolo. Ain't no gangs to speak of."

"I'm pretty sure she means the government," I said.

Bai had gone into the kitchen with a six-pack and now he came back into the living room holding one beer. It was like the opposite of a miracle. "I brought Dana," he said.

Jenny pulled cards out of the deck and threw them back in. "Can Dana... play?" she said.

"She can watch," said Bai.

"The game is Knockdown Dragout," said Jenny, not without malice.

Knockdown Dragout is the cross-dressing antistrip poker game I posted about last November. Annoyingly, but profitably, Bai kept his phone on the table during the game and devoted most of his time to looking at his phone and making kissy-faces with Dana. By the time Curic contacted me, Bai had lost pretty thoroughly and Jenny had to get out her lipstick.

"You're losing real money, dude," Jenny told him.

"And real dignity," I said. Bai mumbled and applied the lipstick like chapstick.

"I'm just gonna write that lipstick off," said Jenny. She was dressed as one of Bai's old frat brothers, wearing a Hornets cap, a single dude-earring, and a baggy white T-shirt that said "BEER IS LIKE WOMEN, BUT I FORGET WHY." I was doing pretty well, having only been forced to wear a skirt, plus one of Jenny's bras under my shirt.

Curic:
The package is ready for delivery. Are
you ready to bring it inside?
ABlum:
yeah, we're just sitting around down here wearing each other's clothes
Curic:
Is that merely a colorful idiom or
is it a cultural phenomenon I should investigate?
ABlum:
it is neither

We went into the backyard in various levels of drag. Bai finally put his phone away. "Are we gonna see it?" he said.

"It's too small," I said, "and it doesn't heat up enough to glow. It just lands."

And it landed, but not for another ten minutes. The tiny shockwave rattled us and knocked over the aforementioned beer cans. This package was much bigger than the old one—an egg of re-entry foam five feet long.

"Whoop!" said Bai, and pounced on it. "Jesus it's hot!"

Jenny held up my oven mitts. "This is why humans invented tools," she said. "Let's get it inside before it starts a grass fire."

"Yeah," I said, "or my crazy neighbor mistakes us for racoons and shoots us."

The top of the egg had "Constellation Shipping" etched on it, and the same starfield I'd seen on my USB key. We put the egg in the bathtub, this side up, and Bai shook my bottle of rubbing alcohol like a madman.

"Whoa whoa," I said.

Jenny took a water pick out of her purse. "This isn't one of your parties, Bai," she said. "We're going to use as little alcohol as possible."

"It's just the packing material," said Bai. "You want to sell it online?"

"You see packing material," said Jenny, "I see sculpting medium."

Bai took off his dress and rolled up the half-sleeves of his polo shirt. "Do you open your Christmas presents this way?"

"Yes I do," said Jenny. She cut a channel down the middle of the egg and Bai and I pulled the two halves apart while Jenny filmed the unboxing video. The Brain Embryo slid out of the eggshell, a heavy oblong shape like two couches sixty-nining.

Like the kid with the big half of the wishbone, I staggered back with the side of the egg that contained the Brain Embryo. Bai held the empty half, except it wasn't empty.
Stuff
started pouring out of the cavity in the middle, and into the bathtub. Plastic sheets, wires, adapter cables. Cables spanning the ninety million years of history between the Farang Brain Embryo and the human high-def TV.

"Shit," said Bai, shaking out the foam block. "Where are the instructions?"

I set the Brain Embryo on the toilet seat. "Curic sent me instructions," I said, "but they're written in Simple Affect Metadata Exchange."

Bai knelt in the bathtub, fondled the cables and held one up. "This end is a DCMI cable," he said.

"Yes," said Jenny, "and the other end is a condom."

I looked up Curic's instructions. They were written in a very old dialect of SAME that got more and more recent as it described cables further along the chain from the Brain Embryo. The last sentence was in English: "Attach the spectrum converter to a television using the provided cable."

We moved everything into the living room. "Should be simple enough," said Bai. "We work backwards." He unfolded a large sheet of black plastic, like a road map of space.

"This diagram looks like an absorbtion spectrum," he said. "It could be the spectrum converter."

"The condom won't fit on that," said Jenny.

"That's what she said."

"Jesus Christ, Bai!"

"Putting aside whether or not what's what she said," I said, "that's photosynthesis paint. It's what they use on the moon base."

"So, this is the power source," said Bai.

"And it's nighttime," said Jenny. She sighed. "I'm going home."

"I'll drive you," said Bai.

That's why we still haven't played any Brain Embryo games. And that's why Bai is wearing lipstick in the unboxing video.

GAME REVIEWS YOU WERE TOO SHY TO ASK OUT IN HIGH SCHOOL 2.0 PRESENTS
Gatekeeper
(c. 90 million years ago)
A game by Clan Snowman
Reviewed by Ariel Blum

Publisher:
Clan Snowman
Platforms:
Brain Embryo
ESRB rating:
T for light blasphemy

The Brain Embryo is a thirty-pound square computer that glistens like mother-of-pearl. My replica only weighs ten pounds, because it's full of Constellation nanocomputers suspended in moon dust, instead of primitive Farang electronics. The case splits in half like a clamshell, and here comes the input device, looking a little like a pipe organ and a lot like an abacus.

The Brain Embryo is built like the military-surplus typewriter you inherited from your great-uncle Toby's attic. I accidentally dropped it on the floor while setting it up, and the worst that happened was all the little sliding disks slid into the "up" position. (Also my heart stopped from fright—hey, those defibrilator paddles really work!)

OH YEAH IT'S A NEW SYSTEM, HERE ARE THE SPECS
The Brain Embryo
(c. 90 million years ago)
Species:
Farang
Civilization:
Dhihe Coastal Coalition
Developer:
Clan Not Completely Underwater
Publishing Lifetime:
54 Earth years

A typical Brain Embryo entertainment simulation uses four or ten of the pipe organ/abacus controls. The other 150 are for programming and database work.
Gatekeeper
only uses one little abacus bead. Slide your glistening resin bead up and down; send it spinning with a quick flick of the finger. The game that's like performing a sex act.

Gatekeeper
is the simplest Brain Embryo game. It's stored in a little screw-in memory cylinder along with tens of thousands of other games and pieces of software. Another species' computing history, smashed into the equivalent of a 128-gigabyte flash memory card. Shake the cylinder, yup, it's also full of moon dust.

Here's what the Constellation Database of Electronic Games of a Certain Complexity has to say about
Gatekeeper
:

The Gatekeeper, a minor figure in the Consensus Mythos, manages traffic between the land of the living and the land of the dead. In this game you adopt the Gatekeeper's dull task indefinitely. Due to its simplicity, a game mostly of theoretical interest to ludologists.

(All CDBOEGOACC translations are Curic's. For the time being there will be no localizations of the games themselves. The people of the Dhihe Coastal Coalition spoke Edink, a language which nobody on the contact mission understands because it's older than human language itself.)

The Brain Embryo unit has a small plexiglass display on top, protected by a fold-up cloth, but it's useless for a human—too small and too far into the infrared. A series of cables and adapters, as long as a mature tapeworm, blue-shifts the image into the visible spectrum and formats it to fit my television.

The Gatekeeper is a blue blob that stands in the center of your television, moving up and down along with the bead on its rod. Traffic comes from both sides of the screen—mostly from the right, from people dying. You need to let normal traffic through, while flicking away dead people who shouldn't be living (zombies) and living people who shouldn't be dying (suicides?).

The most interesting thing about this game is that there's legitimate traffic from the land of the dead into the land of the living! These seem to be Serious Ghosts with Legitimate Business on the other side, like Hamlet's old man.

Flanking the tiny glass display on the Brain Embryo are two flip-up pieces that emit weak radio waves. The radio waves tickle a Farang's antennacles, stimulating the "water-sense" and inducing detailed 3D hallucinations that take a lot of load off the system's graphics processor. On the back of the case is what I can only assume is an FCC notice that this does not qualify as a Class B digital device.

I don't have antennacles, so I'm flicking this bead against the blobs I see on the screen, the two-dimensional shadows of the shapes that make up the Gatekeeper and the zombies. For a game this simple, that's good enough.

Gatekeeper
is a game with no win condition. As in all arcade-type games, eventually you screw up at your Gatekeeping job and are fired. Your boss is a comical looking yellow oval who comes on screen and beats you with a baguette, and I'd laugh except I think that goofy fucker might be G-d.

The hardare manufacturer for the Brain Embryo is the Not Completely Underwater clan. It's a company name that surely loses something in translation, but one which I find bursting ith optimism.

The CDBOEGOACC is right.
Gatekeeper
is a dull game, a simple arcade-type game similar to games that went out of style thirty years ago. It's a game from another planet that I can play on my television. I recommend it.

Curic:
Those are not zombies. They're probably people who
want a refund.
ABlum:
a refund on what?
Curic:
Their lives.
ABlum:
sounds like a zombie to me
Curic:
I am going to do research on human zombies to
prove you wrong.

Update #2, ten minutes after that:

Curic:
Zombies are fully dead people who come back to
life for no reason.
What you are seeing is when one half of a person
dies, the other half wants a refund.
Otherwise the entire person will die in a few hours.
ABlum:
who gives out the refunds?
Curic:
There are no refunds.
That's the point of the game.