Constellation Games (18 page)

We've had two months. A full sixty years after contact, the Ip Shkoy were using extraterrestrial technology to build shitty products to rip each other off. (The system I played
*
on was itself a piece of shit, with a
shveil
disclaimer as long as Tetsuo's hindarm.) The most effective ET game I've played so far is a nihilistic satire of a culture where nobody trusts anybody else. The Aliens didn't formally join the Constellation for
six thousand years
.

We've had two months. Things can get a lot worse than a spat about whether an ice shelf should be moved to the moon or left to melt, and still turn out all right. And if you're like Agent Fowler, worried that the Constellation is crushing our essential humanity with a deadly combination of military might and New Age philosophy, you should find
*
a very reassuring work of art.

But for me this
is
the a-lot-worse. I'm looking at a future where a lot of my friends, and the woman I'd really like to be able to call my girlfriend, live at the top of a gravity well that I can never climb again. As Curic once told me about a totally different game:

Curic:
There are no refunds.
That's the point of the game.

I should have bought two.

UNKNOWN NUMBER usually spells trouble. I picked up anyway, because I'm a sap, and it beats waiting for the compiler to run.

"This is Ariel."

Click. Pop. Clickety click.

"Hello? Is this Curic?"

"Stand by for a personal call from the International Space Station." said nobody in particular.

"What, I should stand at attention or—"

"Hi, Ari!"

"Tammy! Oh, shit, it's good to talk to you!"

"Whatcha been up to?"

Well, this sure turned around quick. "Just writing this damn indie game," I said. "Nothing else to do, y'know? Where are you?"

"I'm on the space station," said Tammy, her voice fuzzy. "The old one. Some of the guys set up a port between here and Ring City so we could use NASA's phone system. There's some problem with the Internet, so I haven't been getting your emails or anything."

"There's no
problem
," I said. "The net is blocked. It's been blocked for two weeks, because of the fiasco with the Antarctic ice sheet."

"I thought that was resolved," said Tammy.

"If you mean 'resolved' in the optical sense of 'brought into clear focus,' then yes, it has been resolved." My compiler died. I turned off my monitor so I wouldn't try to fix it.

"Well, that sucks, so, um, if there's not going to be any Internet it's super-important that I get through these topics with you so I can get in a couple more phone calls."

"Topics?" I said. "Are you doing a checklist?"

"Yes. Item one, I moved in to our apartment."

Our
apartment. "O-okay, that's cool."

"I'm not sleeping there, it's just so I can shower off-duty, and crap, and eat real food in one gee. I'm so sick of that damn freeze-dried ice cream. Ari, it's so good: I am literally eating pie in the sky."

"Um."

"Not right this minute, obviously. Somebody brought up strawberries and now strawberry pie is in the Repertoire."

"Those might be my strawberries. I got them at the farmer's market. The TSA squished them up."

"Well, you can't tell in the pie. It's the best thing I've tasted in forever."

"Did you call to make me want pie? Because it's not exactly scarce on Earth. Like, there's a restaurant in Austin that only serves pie."

"No!" said Tammy, and I could picture the cute annoyed face she was making. "I just wanted to tell you that when you come back up, there's free pie."

"You know me, Doctor Miram," I said. "I'll eat your pie in the sky any day of the week."

"... Ari, this call's going through Houston."

"Oh, shit. Is this some Candid Camera thing? Am I like up on the big board in Mission Control?"

"No, just... stow the innuendo. That was cute, though. Points for that. Item two, you left your clothes in the apartment, so I put them on the top bunk. Item three, I need some advice."

"My advice."

"This Gaijin guy's been talking to a bunch of the astronauts, and a couple shifts ago he asked me to join a fluid overlay he's working on. And I have no idea what that means, Ari, how much work it is. Is it more like a birthday party or more like a marriage?"

"Hold on a sec, I'm looking it up," I said. I turned the monitor back on.

"Anything you look up, came from up here," said Tammy. "I want to know your experience."

"It's just how they do things," I said. "Like, when Curic came to Earth, she formed an overlay with me and Jenny and Bai to scan my house. But then the two of us ended up doing all the work. And on the other end you got the really big overlays like Save the Humans and Plan C, which are more like political parties. Just saying 'overlay' doesn't say anything."

"Oh, this guy's name." Tammy laughed and it did things to my stomach. "This guy's actual name is 'He Sees The Map And He Throws The Dart!'. Can you believe that?"

"I guess it's a
little
long for a Gaijin name. What is his overlay going to do?"

Tammy took a deep breath. "He Sees The Map And He Throws The Dart! wants to set up a colony on Mars. He's under the delusion that if he talks to enough astronauts, he can get their space agencies to buy in."

"I don't want you to go to Mars," I said. "We've already got the longest-distance long-distance relationship in human history."

"We discussed this," said Tammy, pissed off at having to discuss something twice. "I'm not
going
to Mars. They want my help on the logistics so that this doesn't turn into another PR disaster. Suddenly they're worried about PR! It's as bad as NASA."

"Yeah, again, 'cause of the Antarctica thing. They fucked up and now they want to buy us flowers."

"Oh, is that your strategy?" said Tammy. "
In
teresting."

"No, I give flowers all the time," I said, my voice getting ahead of myself, "because I'm the big-shot head of a game studio. And then when I fuck up, special outings. And jewelry, but not like flashy desperate jewelry—"

"Ari," said Tammy, "can we keep some of this a secret until you actually foul up? I want to call my folks before I get kicked off the line."

"Uh, yeah," I said. "For what it's worth, you absolutely should join this guy's overlay. You gotta make this a big flag-waving thing, yay humanity, because Mars is
our
planet. If the Constellation does something stupid with Mars, humanity goes into total lockdown, and we'll never see each other again."

"Well, we don't want that to happen," said Tammy. "Because then you'd never get to taste this pie."

"Oh, so double entendres are okay?"

"Well, give it to me straight," said Jenny. "Do we still have a game company?"

This is yesterday. Jenny and I had a business brunch at Moe's, a diner I first visited in college after hearing they had an original
Mutant's Revenge
cocktail arcade cabinet. Well, they did have the cabinet, and a whole "quirky 1980s" theme to go with it, with New Wave music (vinyl, of course) and pinball and so on.

The food was great, although I thought it was kind of tacky to serve the appetizers on cocaine mirrors, and I came back whenever I could afford it. A couple months after I first ate there, I came in to see that the proprietor (strangely, not named Moe) had sold off the entire decor to a restaurant in Albuquerque that wanted a "quirky 1980s" theme, and the customers were now sitting on folding chairs.

Turns out Phillip (not Moe!) is a loot farmer. He's got an antiquing hobby on the side, and once he's assembled a full set of decor, he ships it off to some other bar or restaurant and starts over. The only thing that never changes is the menu.

Phillip-not-Moe is currently reproducing the damn Tiki Room in his restaurant. He's almost covered every flat surface, so come in and see it before it's back to the folding chairs.

"We absolutely still have a game company," I told Jenny. "In fact, I was afraid you might get cold feet, so I prepared this little business chart." I took a few sugar-substitute packets out of a wooden tiki head and stacked them on the table.

"This is the work we've done so far," I said. "Art assets, game engine, and so on. Proof of concept. Now we begin crunch time." I dumped the rest of the packets out of the tiki head, forming a pile next to the neat stack. "I go head down and work like a motherfucker to get a demo out." I pulled a few packets from the pile and formed another neat stack on the other side. "As we approach completion, we start showing it off, getting people excited while we finish the level design and prep for a real release. And then people give us money. Uh, money not shown on this chart."

"I don't think there's any meaningful way in which you 'prepared' this chart," said Jenny. "Nor does it deal with the problem I'm actually concerned about. Which is that we won't
get
any money remaking a game made by the folks who tried to fuck up Antarctica."

"I'm getting to that," I said. I picked up an opaque novelty hula-girl sugar jar and set it alongside my sugar substitute timeline.

"And then there's an unknown amount of sugar in this container," I said. "Or possibly agave nectar. Which represents the time it takes for Charlene Siph and the rest of the Hierarchy Interface overlay to bribe and sweet-talk the governments. Maybe she can do it with the Greenland treaty and some giveaway tech like the smart paper. Maybe she has to throw in some cold fusion or something. But it's like an hourglass. We just wait for the sugar to run out, and we'll be best pals with the Constellation again, and we can sell
Sayable Spice: Earth Remix
."

The waitress delivered our brunch and I had to hurriedly clean my release schedule off the table. Jenny put her hands palms-up on either side of her place setting. "Ariel," she said. "I'm sorry that I kept saying that you gave up on things too easily."

"Ah, because now you see a new side of me. The tentative Ariel. No, ten-acious is the word. Tenacious Ariel."

"No, I'm sorry I harped on it because now you're overcompensating. You're putting a hell of a lot of faith in Hierarchy Interface. They're politicians; their job is to disappoint you."

"I'm putting faith in the news cycle," I said. "We can't ignore the Constellation, we can't kill them, and they're not going to kill us. Sooner or later, we'll
have
to make up with them, just to have something to show on TV."

Jenny gene-spliced strawberry into her French toast. "They can leave," she said. "If Save the Humans loses the argument, which they probably will after this, the Constellation will go home and leave us to rot on this planet. Try selling your game then."

"
Our
game. And they can't just leave. They collapsed the wormhole after they came here. They have to send another one back to Constellation space. It'll take years. Meanwhile, we've got the smart paper, the Mars colony. Human Ring, assuming it ever stops looking like a fucking motel hallway. All the stuff we put in movies because we couldn't do it in real life. We'll get over it. We'll both get over it."

The waitress came back and refilled Jenny's coffee. Jenny picked up the hula girl and poured in some of the sugar—it was in fact sugar. "I wish to introduce an agenda item," she said.

"I already told you there is no budget for goth love slaves."

"We should see if Curic or Tetsuo can get us a prototype of the smart paper," said Jenny. "If it's as good as people are saying, we should target that platform instead of the existing ones."

"It would be nice to look at the technology," I said. "But they'll probably slap a compatibility layer on top to make it look like a crappy human embedded processor, only faster. So that idiots with Microsoft certifications instead of brains don't have to learn Gaijin programming languages from the Jurassic period."

"Why do you just assume everything is crap, Ariel? You said the DS Twin was crap, and then you spent two years writing games for it."

"Crappy games."

"You do this for a living!" said Jenny. "What is this? I don't go around saying that 3D printing is crap."

"This same thing happened with the Aliens," I said. "They would have invented computers in twenty or thirty years, but instead the Constellation came to town, and filed the serial numbers off some Farang models for them."

"And then they got a head start on making cool games."

"More like, then they made shitty computers for fifty years, because it was easier to make computers than to learn computer
science
. Smart paper is going to destroy the whole tech industry, just like one-dollar apps destroyed software."

"Well, don't go down with the friggin' ship," said Jenny. "Let's get on top of this thing."

"And I don't even know the point of the game we're remaking," I said, "because I can't play it in English. If I were smart, I'd cancel the
Sayable Spice
project and start over with
The Long Way Around
. But that would be a very expensive decision."

"That doesn't sound very counterfactually smart to me," said Jenny. "Why didn't you play
Sayable Spice
in English on the space station? Wasn't that your big chance?"

"Yeah," I said. "I was going to ask the Ring City station computer to fork off a fractal submind that could learn Edink. But I chickened out. It was too much like having a child. So I just played the Alien remake some more, with Tetsuo translating from Pey Shkoy."

"It's close enough, right?"

"I guess," I said. "It's pretty obvious what the Aliens added. Like,
Sayable Spice
is about how food tasted better when you were younger." I looked down at my omelette. Food
did
taste better when I was a kid. What had happened? "So of course, in
Recapture That Remarkable Taste
, the sex was better too. Apparently Aliens get less perverted as they get older."

"Y'all okay here?" said the waitress.

Jenny covered her coffee cup with her hand. "Yeah, fine," I said.

"We can do this remake," said Jenny. "I think we have the general idea. Just don't blame me if the hula girl here never runs out of sugar."

Crispy Duck Games: WE HAVE THE GENERAL IDEA.

Crispy Duck Games: BECAUSE THE HULA GIRL CONTAINS A FINITE AMOUNT OF SUGAR.