Constellation Games (13 page)

GAME REVIEWS FROM SPACE 2.0 PRESENTS
Ev luie Aka's Ultimate DIY Lift-Off
A game by The Ul Neie Corporation
Reviewed by Ariel Blum

Publisher:
The Ul Neie Corporation
Platforms:
Simulates Hi-Def False Daylight
ESRB rating:
T for stylized violence and general bastardry

I lay prone on a cylindrical beanbag chair in the replica Ip Shkoy apartment. Tetsuo Milk, my guide to ancient Alien culture, assembled a False Daylight memory cylinder from modular parts, following a diagram on a paper insert.

"I little know this period of history," said Tetsuo Milk. "I've been focusing on the time three generations after contact. But this game was named after someone I recognized, and I was lucky enough to get a first edition."

"It's a replica," I said.

"Yes," said Tetsuo, "a replica of the first edition. Curic thinks you will be satisfied with soft-dolls, but I believe in the most accurate experience possible." He screwed the memory cylinder into the False Daylight unit.

"What's a soft-doll?"

"Curic gave you a
looks
like a False Daylight computer," said Tetsuo, "but it's not a real replica. It is nanologic in particulate suspension. It contains all the software everyone made for the system. You don't have to change memory devices at all times. It won't malfunction after a while so that you buy a newer computer. It's a soft-doll. This," he patted the battered False Daylight, "is a
real
replica."

"Okay, I get it," I said. "You're a retro snob. Why do you call it a soft-doll?"

"Oh, there's a Gaijin folktale," said Tetsuo. "A child's parents die, so ki makes replacement parents out of cloth and sand. But cloth and sand can't love you." He paused. "However, they can't die, either," he admitted.

"I ask because 'soft doll' is
almost
the name of a human piece of software: an AI program that lets you pretend to have a girlfriend."

"Well, there you are," said Tetsuo. He turned on the projector, which lit up the apartment wall with its washed-out pink light.

"First time perfect," said Tetsuo. "
Ev luie Aka's Ultimate DIY Lift-Off
."

"I don't see anything."

"Oh, the spectrum!" said Tetsuo. "I made an adapter for human eyes, but it's not historically accurate." He crawled across the apartment floor, looking in trapdoors, translating a little song into English as he searched:

Ev luie Aka, here she comes
Looking down through the
cma
at you
Ev luie Aka, there she goes
If you've been bad, she'll fuck you up

"Who's Ev luie Aka?" I said. "Some kind of sky deity?"

"She was my species' first astronaut," said Tetsuo. "One of the only ones, really, before-contact. She was Ip Shkoy, like this computer. She took a few orbits in the
Standing Committee on Appropriations
."

"The what now?"

"You pay for it, you get to name it."

Tetsuo slipped a dark cap over the projector's lens and its light shifted into the visible spectrum. A torpedo-shaped slug of purple metal wobbled back and forth among explosions and what looked like an attempt to do particle effects using two-dimensional polygons.

"You can see?" Tetsuo asked me.

"The colors are off, but I can see them. You see it okay?"

"I see most about everything." Tetsuo stretched his torso forward to the False Daylight abacus and started the game. Projected on the apartment wall was a patch of green sky instrumented with crosshairs and fringed by trees. Pey Shkoy characters scrolled in from the left.

"'We're preparing for lift-off,'" Tetsuo read. "'Holy shit, space monsters! We're under attack! Save us, Ev luie Aka!' Now we launch, I suppose."

The trees (
cma
, whatever) and the clouds peeled away, and Tetsuo was flying over a globe. Blobs swooped down from higher orbits and took up holding patterns. Big red symbols appeared on the screen.

"'Your time limit is one orbit,'" Tetsuo read. "'Kill everybody.' There is not much concern for historical accuracy here. How should I kill people from a primitive orbiter? Perhaps I drop empty fuel tanks on them?"

"In these games you always have missiles or something. Shift the beads at the edges."

Tetsuo mashed at the abacus and a black dot shot out at the vanishing point in the middle of his crosshairs. "This is ridiculous," said Tetsuo.

"What's that say?"

"It says, 'Orbit complete, touch down at landing site.'" Tetsuo's ship lost atitude and slammed into the ground.

"Hrm," he said. "'You could not land. You are dead. You left six enemies alive. Down' — that's just the Pey Shkoy name for the planet — 'Down is doomed! Set clips on positions blah-de-blah to reduce difficulty."

Tetsuo's review: "That was really terrible. The geography was accurate, though. Let's play something else."

"Hold on," I said, "let me try." I pulled the abacus towards me and started a new game.

"'Preparing for lift-off,'" said Tetsuo, "same shit as the other time."

I made an inventory of the abacus beads, projectile-vomiting polygons into the distance. "This
is
a little weird," I said. "I'm pretty sure the Mercury orbiters didn't have any weapons."

"It's all made up. Ev luie Aka orbited Down five times and landed in the ocean. There were no weapons and no space monsters."

"Whoa! What's that?"

"Aerial mine," said Tetsuo.

"Why am I dropping mines in
front
of my ship?"

"I cannot answer that question." My ship hit the mine I'd just dropped and belly-flopped into the
cma
, which started to burn.

"'You could not land, you are dead,'" read Tetsuo. "'You killed everybody, you shalt proceed to the next launch.'"

"'Shalt'?"

"It's an archaic usage. I just want to convey the vicinity. How do you know so much about old Ip Shkoy spacecraft?"

"It's not a real spacecraft. It's an idealized 3D environment with one degree of freedom. You've seen one, you've seen thirty to forty percent of them."

"You have some kind of preternatural pilot's ability?

"No," I said. "I just play a lot of games. This is only difficult because the controls are an abacus. Okay, what does this say? I need to know what I'm shooting at."

"You are shooting at Farang."

"What. The. Fuck." My hands dropped, the abacus beads clattered down to their rest positions and I stared at Tetsuo. "Curic? I'm trying to kill
Curic
here?"

"The evil Constellation are mining your home planet for materials to build a space station. You—"

"Did that actually happen?"

"It happened not! The Constellation used occlusions... in English... asteroids! The whole game is a bullshit, like with your people and the moon."

With no hand nudging the beads I spun out and crashed into an enemy ship—a Farang ship. The screen turned white. Well, pink.

"Why'd they put this in a game? The False Daylight system is Farang technology in the first place. It's insulting."

"I don't have specific knowledge of this game," said Tetsuo, "but cultures change very rapidly after contact. People were afraid."

"No, I see it," I said. "Ev luie Whoever went into space on her own, before the Constellation came. That made her a folk hero. The same thing is happening on Earth. Astronauts are being idolized. They're tough dudes who fly human spacecraft. Not slobs like me who were lucky enough to get an exit visa and almost threw up on a Constellation shuttle."

Tetsuo thumped the floor with his tail. "That is a model with explanatory power."

"This was like fifty years after the Constellation contacted the Aliens?"

"I don't know about years," said Tetsuo. "Almost two generations."

"Why would someone's grandchildren still be pissed at the Constellation? What did they do?"

"They wanted us to change," said Tetsuo. "They came to our planet and they wouldn't shut up about fluid overlays and unhierarchical forms of social organization. We felt like we had to listen to them, because they were so powerful. But secretly we thought of them as monsters from space. And now here we are at
your
planet, and we are the monsters from space."

"Why'd you come here? Why even bother?"

"Don't you want to be a monster from space, too?"

"Ha! Weak point!" I stabbed Tetsuo five times in the torso. "Eat an honor blade, motherfucker!"

"Hello again," said Curic, walking into the replica Ip Shkoy apartment.

"Uh, hi," I said, "the thing I just said to Tetsuo was in the context of this game we're playing,
Rolling Weight
. I don't actually want him to eat an honor blade."

"And I didn't actually hear what you said," said Curic. "I came to tell you that your friends would like you to stop playing games and go to sleep."

I rolled off the beanbag chair onto my back. "My friends? Why are my friends involved in this decision?"

"I've turned your social network into a fluid overlay for your off-world maintenance," said Curic. "Your friends have been very helpful. The idea is to keep you from dying of undersleep or radiation poisoning."

I pulled out my phone; I had ten unanswered messages. "There's no such thing as undersleep," I said. "And you don't need to bring in peer pressure. Sleep isn't smoking. You could have just said 'Hey, it's two-thirty, time to pack it in.' And I'd go."

"That's not what your friends told me," said Curic.

"My friends are just jealous." I stood up. "At least, that's what my mother used to tell me."

"I have your duffel bag," said Curic. "I'll take you back to Human Ring."

The duffel bag was as big as Curic herself. I took it off her hands and we left Tetsuo's replica apartment. As soon as I was not playing video games anymore, the distance from Austin and the time since I'd slept started creeping up on me, making me yawn in a way that terrified small tree-dwelling Alien Ring animals.

"Tetsuo made a
store
," I said, laughing. "An Ip Shkoy store. If we want to play a new game, we have to go to the store and buy it. It's so ridiculous."

"If you're going to live here—"

"I'm here for a
week
," I said. "Let me have fun."

"—you should affiliate yourself with one of the existing human communities. I don't want something bad to happen to you."

"Like, who, the Eritreans? Haven't they been through enough? The last thing they need is an American sticking his nose into their business."

Curic and I walked into the pitch-black
cma
forest and climbed into an Alien-sized Ewok bucket on a rope. Curic stood on the tippy-top of the bucket and started shifting rope like it weren't no thang, pulling us up through the forest.

"What about the humans inhabiting the microgravity environments?" she asked, without stopping for breath.

"Who?"

"You know," said Curic. "The government employees. Not the spies, the insular group. The ones with the patches on their clothes."

"The whole reason I'm here is to learn about the Constellation. I'm not going to waste time hanging out with humans, even if they are cool astronauts."

"You need to maintain a human connection," said Curic, "or you'll forget human body language. And I don't think you want to hang out with the spies."

"Oh, shit!" I said. "I forgot.
I'm
a spy."

"Then perhaps you
would
—"

"No, you don't understand. I told the BEA I'd report on the Constellation. It was the only way they'd let me come up here. And I spent the whole day playing video games with Tetsuo. I've got nothing to report."

"Do you have any experience in spycraft?" asked Curic. "Infiltration? Cold reading? Propaganda? Torture? Extracting false confessions?"

"No!" I said. "How could you think that?"

"They can't expect very much from you," said Curic. "The other spies I've met are professionals. Just write about the games."

Our bucket breached the
cma
plant and showed us the sky. It was nighttime here, just like it was in Austin, but there were no stars in the sky. The "sky" here was just the day side of Alien Ring. The home of another four million Aliens, who, if the night side was anything to go on, were right now swinging through the
cma
on rope ladders, building replicas of historical environments, chatting with humans over the Internet, and having sex with each other every half hour.

Curic and I walked from the bucket to a big jumble of bubble airlocks, just like the ones on the moon. Another group of ports connecting Alien Ring to every other Ring. Tiny flying night creatures swarmed around the airlocks, certain that the daylight from other worlds was somehow important, not at all certain whether to approach the light or flee it.

"We're almost there," said Curic. We pushed and tugged ourselves through the thickened-jelly airlock, through a wormhole, into a hotel hallway.

Okay, hotel hallways are a little narrower, and carpeted, and they end eventually, but that's what we're dealing with here. A shiny hall made of moon-dust ceramic, with big round doors on either side and inoffensive diffuse light coming from nowhere in particular. I expected to see signs for the ice machine.

I sagged in the Earth-normal gravity. I took off my breathing mask. "What is
this?
" I said.

"The human environment," said Curic.

"Where's the techno-primitive aesthetic? Where's the
trees
?"

"We don't have any Earth trees," said Curic. "We built the kind of environment humans enjoy."

"This is a fucking
hospital
," I said. There were no smudges on the walls, no dust on the floor. "It's a cubicle farm. We don't
enjoy
this environment. People
make
us stay here."

"It looks like a space station," said Curic. I think I'd hurt her feelings.

I walked toward one of the doors and it irised open, just like a door on a space station. The temperature of Human Ring is seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. Through the door was a room the size of the Ip Shkoy apartment I'd just left. It contained a bunkbed, a combination sink+shower, and a squat toilet. The walls and the fixtures were the same ceramic as the hallway, lit by the same nondirectional light.

I looked back, out at the endless rows of doors. "How long is this hallway? It looks like it goes on forever."

"It does," said Curic. "It's a loop around the Ring."

"No one's going to come here," I said. "What the fuck. No one will go through what I had to go through, for this."

"This is a temporary structure," said Curic, almost pleading. "We know we're not humans. This was our best guess. It won't stay this way. Your greatest artists and architects will come here to redesign Human Ring. The challenge will be irresistable. We'll train them in metafractal reduction, and in five years, this habitat will look completely different."

"What government's going to send an artist up here for five years? I'm a
spy
, and I have to go home in six days!"

"Then the refugees or the astronauts will do it," said Curic. "It will happen eventually."

"I won't sleep in a twin-size bunkbed," I said. "This isn't computer camp."

"Sleep in the hallway," said Curic. "Or go to the central cylinder and sleep in microgravity, like the astronauts. Or make your own bedding from the Repertoire. But know that your friends on Earth want you to sleep, and they want you to breathe a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere while you do it."

I gave up. I left Curic outside and let the door close like a techno-anus behind me. There were no sheets and no pillows on the bed; just a soft fabriclike skin over the matress. I put my head on my duffel bag and instead of going to sleep, I wrote an email to Krakowski and Fowler.

Subject:
The thrilling adventures of ARIEL THE SPY

Yesterday (July 18) I played video games. All games mentioned are from the Aliens' Ip Shkoy civilization of 17 million years ago, created ~50 Earth years after their contact with the Constellation. Played on a replica system in a historically accurate setting in conjunction with a hard-core professional historian.

Ev luie Aka's Ultimate DIY Lift-Off
: Anti-Constellation propaganda. An astronaut comes back from the dead to stop the Constellation from strip-mining the Alien homeworld. A technically interesting rails shooter where the 'rail' is the orbit of your Vostok-style spacecraft, said spacecraft having been anachronistically equipped with guided missiles and aerial mines.

Gourmand's Delight
: Action game. Throw food into the other guy's mouth until he pukes. Social commentary? Historian sez: "No, puking is funny."

Recapture That Remarkable Taste
: Inferior remake of Farang
Sayable Spice
(see my blog passim, or don't). Thanks to knowledge of period food, historian was able to unlock rather explicit cutscenes, playable through dialogue trees.

Gewnoy Multislam
: Allegedly a game pitting different styles of martial art against each other. Game refused to start because it believed it was a pirated copy. Most likely culprit is defective temperature sensor in replica False Daylight system. Will play in historian-approved emulator later.

Rolling Weight: Failure To Protect The Innocent
: Police procedural set in impoverished cities outside Alien homeworld's equatorial forests. Hard-boiled mood somewhat upset by player character's ridiculously high jump. Optional second and third players control all NPCs. Engrossing; native-language strategy guide has been employed. Have in possession a saved game at ~25% completion.

Today: more games, probably.

Love and kisses,
Ariel