Constellation Games (22 page)

"Game night" begins at four in the afternoon when the game is
Limited Nuclear Exchange
. It's a game for the unemployed and the self-employed. Setup is a fun time all by itself: not only the physical/espionage map with the dispositions of the missile silos and laboratories spread out across three card tables, but the propaganda/ideology boards on which the competing worldviews of East and West duke it out. Because if you only play with the physical map, you're a douchebag who just likes to blow things up. Yeah, I said that, and you can take it to the bank.

Around four-thirty wall time, Jenny and I will set the Doomsday Clock to 11:55 and begin play. But now I'm laying nuke chits face-down across the Kazakh SSR, secrets that Jenny will gradually reveal with satellite flyovers.

"I'm going to put a man on Mars this time," I said.

"Not in this expansion," said Jenny. "We can't even do that in real life. Not without space aliens helping us."

"We had probes on Mars in the Seventies," I said. "I could do it if I had more science chits and fewer nuke chits."

"Keep talking, you pinko," said Jenny. "You keep your eye on Mars, and Mr. Universe will sneak into your silos and punch your fissile material until it decays into americium." (We are playing with the superhero expansion.) "And that's America's element, so you can't use it."

"Jenny, I think we should change the direction of the
Sayable Spice
remake," I said. All at once, out of nowhere, because if you try to warm Jenny up with an opening act like "I want to tell you something," she'll look at you like the thing you
want
to tell her is too horrible to come out and say.

Well, it didn't work. Jenny looked up from setting ideological traps for me in Central America and gave me the
other
look. The look she'd give "I'm going to put a man on Mars" if there were actually some rule in
Limited Nuclear Exchange
where one player could ruin the game for everyone else by ignoring the balance of terror to pursue some hippy-dippy dream of space exploration. The "oh shit, not only does Ariel have a crazy idea, but there's no way to stop him" look.

"Do you see this? What's happening here?" she said. "You can now witness in real time the process of you not finishing something."

"We're going to finish it," I said. "This is business. I finished
Recoil
and
Give 'em Hell
, and I finished the pony games, and we'll finish this one. I just want to do it properly."

Jenny had a big hand of responses she wanted to give to that, but from that hand she played a conciliatory: "What's 'properly?'."

"The Ip Shkoy thought
Sayable Spice
was a game about food. That's why their remake was lousy.
Sayable Spice
is actually a game about growing up a geek. Constructing your life around fantasies and bits of the past, because the normal adult world doesn't do it for you. Keeping things bottled up until you can release them in a big spectacular display."

Jenny neatly stacked a big pile of chits and plunked them all down on Austin, Texas, her personal capital of the United States. "My problem is that I've spent over a hundred hours drawing pixel art of food," she said. "And the chemicals that make up the food. Because the
mechanics
of
Sayable Spice
are about food."

"And it's good art," I said. "You're really improving. We just need to figure out how to reuse those assets in a game about video games."

"This is not happening," said Jenny. "No, actually, I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier. We have a nice, fun, salable game. A game that might actually be released. So of course you have to self-sabotage. Throw up a roadblock for yourself and take it in some meta direction."

"No, c'mon," I said. "This is important. Games, and comics and shit, are the American equivalent of saturated infant comb. We all play video games when we're kids. But people like Agent Krakowski stop playing them, and then they end up...like Krakowski. Or they only play games that let them be psychopaths, and then they end up like Agent Fowler."

I slapped down a set of five-year-plan cards and Jenny shuffled them so that my plan wouldn't work as planned. "So instead of
Sayable Spice
," I said, "we'll make
Playable Spice
. Instead of collecting chemical compounds, you'll collect game mechanics. And when you have the right combination, instead of a flashback, you'll be able to play through an old-style game. We'll make parodies of all the classic games. It'll be like all those games were twisted in your mind by the horrible process of growing up."

"Do you remember my freshman sculpture project?" asked Jenny.

"You showed me at the time," I said. "I don't really remember it."

"Because it was awful," said Jenny. She gave me back my five-year-plan cards. "Crap, as it were. I had no artistic discipline. I tried to say three different things in one piece. Do you see where I'm going with this?"

"I've been making games for ten years," I said.

"You filled in the backgrounds of Michelangelo's paintings for ten years. You're really good, okay? Or Michelangelo wouldn't have hired you. But if you'd been in charge of
Give 'em Hell
, or any of those games, they'd never have seen daylight."

"I don't want this to be the kind of company where someone's in charge."

"Then it's a good thing our business plan is really obvious," said Jenny. "We just have to stick to it. Release a solid game that sells well and introduces people to the Constellation. And then I can use my share of the money to buy love slaves and build
Protector of Earth
, and you can use your share to make an anthology of sad emo games about growing up."

I looked out at Jenny over the Atlantic ocean. "I think we should just nuke each other once and get it out of our systems," I said.

"Yeah, okay," said Jenny, and grabbed a handful of dice. "First gen H-bombs, no cards, no superheroes. Don't move the chits."

"I wasn't gonna."

"I don't want to set this up again."

And then everybody died. And then we played for real.

Crispy Duck Games: G-DDAMMIT WE WILL RELEASE SOME KIND OF GAME.

The Mars expedition is go! It's just not as exciting as we thought. Instead of a big expensive spaceship with cool liftoff explosions, we're attaching a port to an unmanned probe the size of an pickup truck, and landing the probe on Mars. And instead of being stuck in that expensive spaceship stewing in their own shit for a year and a half, the astronauts will live in (relative) luxury on Ring City and in about six weeks they'll just walk through the port.

I'm super excited about this mission because it means NASA is releasing a lot of video from Ring City, and some of the video features my girlfriend, Dr. Tammy Miram. She's so dreamy! (Especially now that she's resumed showering.) You'll notice I've dropped her blog pseudonym—it's a convention that makes a lot of sense when I'm dating a short-order cook or a copy editor, but NASA only has so many cute blonde astronauts.

This particular cute blonde astronaut is not in the official press conference video. Tammy's not one of the Mars colonists, due to an aversion to living on planets. But as one of the people responsible for making the colonists look like heroes instead of sellouts looking to claim Mars for the Constellation, she's front and center in the star-draw.

The star-draw video is nine minutes long, and I've been watching it every ninety minutes as a break from coding, which means I get to see Tammy about 14% of the time. At this point I'm pretty good at watching this video, so I'll walk you through it.

It's pretty similar to the star-draw we did with Curic on the Fourth. What we got (0:05) is a bunch of human astronauts and Gaijin scientists, gathered around a Very Serious Airlock in Gaijin Ring. Behind the airlock is one end of a port, and on the other end is EMPTY FUCKING SPACE. Thus the airlock. You're looking down the length of the unmanned probe, which is pointed at where Mars will be in six weeks. Ignore the NASA Public Affairs narrator. He's useless, he won't give you this information until (1:09).

I'm in the middle of an all-nighter and more or less insane, but man. All the humans are in clingy transparent Constellation spacesuits (since Gaijin Ring is more or less the same as Mars), and Tammy (0:22) looks
great
. She's torn off the long sleeves of her NASA flight suit and she's got a string of overlay patches running up and across her chest like a sash. It's a look I can get into.

The first time I met Tammy, she wore the standard RC-001 NASA mission patch on the shoulder of her flight suit. At some point, the Gaijin on the Mars mission figured out that human astronauts use patches on their clothes to signal group affiliation. Now the Gaijin and the astronatus produce a patch for every single fluid overlay they form. Which means a complete record of each person's work for the past month on his/her/kis/kes body.

Tammy is rocking the "overzealous Girl Scout" look. Colonel Mason, the square-jawed meathead who'll probably be planting the flag, has his patches lined up perfectly across his chest like medals (0:31), with blank spaces here and there like he's collecting Xbox achievements. The Russians (0:33) have sewed all their overlay patches onto the legs of their flight suits, so that they can hide them from Moscow when they call home. The Gaijin just adhere the patches onto their trunks with no pattern I can see—looks like a kindergartener attacked them with stickers.

I can't make out the patches themselves because it's streaming video quality, but these mission patches are flashing, they're changing color, some of them look to have video. It's like a disco up there on everyone's clothes. Everyone's smiling up a storm except for Colonel Mason, who apparently never learned how.

A Gaijin speaks first (2:02). It's He Sees The Map And He Throws The Dart!, a male with a scrawny trunk and tentacles that quiver and flop around the floor with emotion. We hear the narrator read an English translation in a monotone: Mars is so important, so beautiful, so much like home. And then Dr. Tammy Miram turns on her suit mike (5:29) and speaks for humanity.

"Humans have been dreaming about Mars for hundreds of years," she says. "We've been planning for this mission for longer than any of us has been alive. After countless hardships and setbacks, our common dream is finally within reach. And I am proud to be part of this mission, as a citizen of the United States of America, and of Earth. But nothing we find on Mars can compare to what we've already discovered right here.

"We've been dreaming about life on other stars since we first understood what stars
are
. And this dream has already come true. We go to Mars not alone, as we thought we would, but with friends. Here's to our friendship."

She holds up a little translucent disk and she smiles at me. At the camera. (6:44—I usually pause it here for a bit.) Everyone reaches into a pocket of their spacesuit, or one of the cleaner Gaijin orifices, and pulls out one of these discs.

This is the star-draw ritual proper, and the narrator will describe it like it's somebody's fucking bris just because they've got cool custom-made discs. Well, when Curic taught us the star-draw in my driveway, we used coins; and for the one I did with Tetsuo in Ring City, we used two smashed peanut M&Ms from the bottom of my duffel bag. I guess what I'm saying is I don't think the narrator's tone is appropriate here. I mute the audio at this point. (6:49)

Everybody's coming around (6:53) to face the Very Serious Airlock and the port behind it. The blue and grey and white flight suits are blocking the camera's view of the port. Eventually whoever's editing this video gives up and cuts to an overhead cam.

Now (6:59) we can see the rest of the humans, the ones in the back running the cameras. They're in spacesuits, too, but they're not astronauts and they don't have many patches on their clothes. They're CNN, or public affairs from the space agencies. They get pushed back, back as human and Gaijin astronauts gather in a big arc about fifteen feet away from the port that will soon be a door onto Mars.

At (7:10) someone throws their disc. It bounces off the airlock and skids to a halt on the green tiled floor. A little ripple of mirth goes through the astronauts—there goes Premature Joe, always blasting off before the countdown's finished—and then off we go, everyone's pitching in. They've done this ritual before—once for every patch on their suits. The discs ricochet off the airlock and fall and knock against each other on the ground. By (7:40) the floor of Gaijin Ring is covered with little round discs.

And the discs start to glow, like fireflies, like tea candles. A pattern of randomly distributed lights, like the stars we can see on the other end of the port. A constellation. The logo for the Mars mission overlay.

And that's it, the mission is on! On the other end of the port, the probe begins to accelerate towards where Mars will be in six weeks. The stars don't shift like they do on TV; they won't shift at all. They're too far away. We're not going to the stars, yet; just to another planet.

At (8:08) the Gaijin begin accosting the camera operators, trying to get them to throw their discs. The camera operators are not taking this well; they're used to being invisible.

We're not going back to the ground-level shot because this shot of the glowing discs is too cool, and I'm not going to see any more of my girlfriend than the top of her head. So that's the end of the video. That's the end of this blog post.

Who is smashing my doorbell at nothing o'clock? Cops generally knock, and burglars have the decency to just break in. I was coming off consecutive all-nighters and someone seemed to have put some kind of
huge fucking pea
under my mattress. Not a good scene.

I clomped down the stairs and opened the door. "Do you know what time it is, you fucking... robot?" The robot was made of Constellation cerametal and had a dozen telescoping arms that let it reach up and give the doorbell a handjob.

"Stop that," I said, slapping one arm away from the doorbell. "Okay, here's the deal. Because you're a wicked-looking robot, I'm going to listen to what you have to say for one sentence. Make it count."

"I'm not a robot," said the robot. "This is telepresence."

"That was pathetic." I turned to shut the door, except I didn't, because behind the robot I saw a glow that looked a lot like sunlight.

"Wait," said the robot. "Her wants you to come to Ring City for a few minutes."

I held the door open. "Who does? Curic? My girlfriend?"

"I'm Curic," said the robot, and pointed at itself four times with four different arms. "It's telepresence!"

"How did you get down here?"

"I jumped," said the Curic-bot.

"So, if you're Curic," I said, "who is it who wants me to come to Ring City?" Please let it be Tammy.

"It's Her," said Curic.

I gently massaged my temples. "Okay, just say her name."

"Her!" said Curic. "The Her superorganism!"

"Oh,
Her
," I said. The ache in my temples migrated to the pit of my stomach. My good sense was fighting a losing battle against my curiosity. "Can I see my girlfriend as long as I'm up there?"

"Not in the usage of 'see her' that I think you have in mind," said Curic. "This is a secret project with a half-life of eight hours. You'll need to return to Earth as soon as possible. It's quite forbidden for me to even set foot on your planet right now. Whence the telepresence."

I felt that the use of telepresence was skirting the law at best, but I had little interest in arguing this with Curic. "Why does Her... she... Her... even want to talk to me?" I said.

"I told Her you were an expert on computer game design," said the Curic-robot.

"Somehow I don't feel like that answers my question."

"Come through the port," said the robot. It picked up a large thin hoop and set it against the railing of my front porch. Through the port I saw the sunlight I'd glimpsed earlier: the soft artificial lighting of Ring City's Human Ring.

"See?" said the robot. "I've set it against the wall. There will be no gravity differential when you go through." Through the port I saw Curic herself step into view and wave at me. The robot jerked aimlessly in time with her movements.

I put my hand through the port. The air on the other side was a few degrees cooler.

"I never get tired of this shit," I said. "This is amazing. You wouldn't need shuttles if you set these up everywhere."

"Yes," said Curic and the robot in unison, "because the shuttles have worked out so well."

I ducked back into my house for my keys and walked through the port. No nausea, no terror of seeing Earth disappear beneath my feet. I just crawled into lunar orbit and into Human Ring. A maze of softly-lit slightly-curved beige hallways, all alike.

"Thanks for coming," said Curic, shrugging off her telepresence harness. "May I offer you some pie?" She held out a plate embossed with little flowers. On the plate was a perfectly cut piece of strawberry pie.

"Man, fuck your pie," I said. "What's with all the pie?"

"I wasn't allowed to give you any when I came down a few days ago," said Curic. She broke off half the pie and pushed it into her antennacled maw. "I'm trying to be nice."

"All right, I'm sorry," I said. I took the other half. It was excellent pie.

Curic tossed the pie plate like a Frisbee down the long featureless hallway. "Through the door," she said. She pointed at a round airlock-style door, the generic Human Ring door. The door behind which might be a featureless two-person Human Ring apartment, or... another featureless two-person Human Ring apartment. Or a long hallway with more round doors leading to more identical two-person apartments.

"Her is in
there
?" I said.

"I'll come with you," said Curic. "She will speak with you. It should only take about twenty minutes."

"Do I need a spacesuit?" I said. I was hoping to score a suit to replace the one the BEA had confiscated.

"That won't be necessary," said Curic. "These Them organisms are engineered for Earthlike environments, such as Human Ring."

"Are these Them organisms engineered to not creep me the fuck out?"

"I don't think cuddliness was a big consideration," said Curic. She paused with her paw out to the door sensor.

"Have you ever given thought to why Smoke paired us together?" she asked. "You and me."

"I didn't really think there were reasons," I said.

"I'm pretty sure it's because we both have problems with authority."

"Give me a break," I said. "You live in a post-scarcity anarchy. How did you develop problems with authority?"

"Ask me that again in twenty minutes," said Curic. Her paw closed a circuit and the door yawned open.

This room was the size of the featureless apartment I'm apparently now sharing with Dr. Tammy Miram. But it wasn't featureless. Instead of a bed and a squat toilet, it had a yellow plastic chair sitting to face a huge structure molded into the far wall: a structure like a wasp's nest carved out of white wood.

"Sit," said Curic. It was the kind of chair you see in corporate cafeterias. I slouched in the chair and stared at the wasp's nest.

"Thank you again for coming," said Curic. "It's extraordinarily important that Her sides with Plan C on this issue."

"What?" I said. "You hate Plan C."

"That's incorrect," said Curic.

"Then I guess sometimes the truth is incorrect," I said.

"Ssh," said Curic. "Here she comes."

The wasp's nest rustled and one of Them crawled out. Another and a third. They looked like trilobites, or giant roly-polies. Dark red, with shells and little claws.

"Hello, Ariel, Curic," said Her. The voice came from every point in the room. It was a human woman's voice resampled, and although I couldn't place it, it sounded familiar. Like when a Farang uses the vocalizer that makes everything come out in George Clooney's voice.

I leaned forward and put my palms on my knees. "Hi," I said.

The trickle of trilobites became a swarm, pouring out of the white wooden nest at the far end of the room. The first two of Them reached my bare feet and climbed inside my pajama legs.

"Whoa!" I said. "The clothes are there for a reason."

"I'll go outside," said Her. The trilobites ducked out of the pajama pants and climbed up my legs. Then the swarm hit. A rope of them up my legs like passengers onto a cruise ship, sneaky stowaways tiptoeing up the legs of the cafeteria chair, all of them coming to cover my chest and legs like the lead blanket the dentist drops on you before shooting you with X-rays. They were warm and dry and terrifying. A small one settled itself into the pocket of my T-shirt.

I closed my eyes and cast around for something else to think about. I noticed that Curic was holding my hand in both of her hands, like my mom did when I was a kid at the doctor. Curic had never touched me on purpose before; she'd never even come close.

"This is Her?" I asked Curic.

"Part of me," said Her. "A very small part. Are you comfortable, Ariel?" That's when I recognized the voice. The oldest person in the universe communicates with humanity through the cute squeaky voice of Sarah Vowell. I couldn't unhear it. Every time she spoke, I expected Her to give an update on her quirky project to visit all the national parks.

"I'm not comfortable," I said. "I'm covered in fucking trilobites."

"It's not pleasant for us either," said one of the individual Them in an even higher-pitched version of Sarah Vowell's voice. "You've got boy cooties!" The rest of Them rustled with faint resentful cries of "Cooties!"

"They're not a predator species like humans," said Her. "They don't sense motion very well. They need physical contact or I can't make you out; you know how it is."

"Not really, no," I said.

"Ho ho ho. Now, Ariel, let me ask you: why did you write the same game five times?"

"What the...?"

"She's talking about the
Pôneis Brilhantes
series," said Curic quietly.

"I figured that, I just thought there'd be some small talk first."

"I asked if you were comfortable," said Her.

"And I said no."

"Oh, this
is
fun," said Her. "Why, Ariel? I would like to know. It even has a number on it.
Pôneis Brilhantes 5
."

"You don't need to convince me that that job sucked." I said. "I already quit. Anyway, they're not literally the same game."

"I'm eight hundred million years old," said Her. "I've seen a lot. Please excuse me if I can't resolve the fine distinctions between
Pôneis Brilhantes
number four and number five."

"Okay," I said, "since you asked, here's how it works. The target market for
Brilhantes
is ten-year-old girls. I came in for
Brilhantes 4
. A year later, the ten-year-olds have turned eleven and think
Brilhantes
is childish, which it is. So we tweak the graphics, change the minigames, and sell
Brilhantes 5
to the nine-year-olds who have just turned ten. It makes perfect sense if you consider the market. Do you even remember what it's like to be ten?"

"Of course," said Her. "Most of my members are juveniles." The trilobites wiggled in unison and I shuddered. "Without them, my outlook would be jaded indeed. Moving on... I learned from your blog that you are a fan of the
Bit Boy
series."

"I am," I said, trying to remember the last time I'd mentioned Bit Boy. She must have read my archives. "I think I see the trajectory of your questioning here."

"That game was made fourteen times."

"I'll stipulate that," I said.

"Why fourteen times? That's very many times."

"I couldn't speculate."

"You're not on trial," said Her. "Nothing bad will happen if you answer one way or the other."

"It sure feels like a trial."

"I'm just trying to get a feel for how human games are made. Why do you think there are so many
Bit Boy
games?"

"I don't know. Creative bankruptcy? Followed by the realization that if they brought it back as self-parody they could exploit peoples' nostalgia for the first four games?"

"I'm going to give you some game titles," said Her. "
Frosting Frenzy
,
Dress Shop
,
Knitja
,
Fondant Fury
,
Micro Mike
,
Squirtd!
,
Outsourced Tech Support
,
Mestre Bolo
,
Big Time Mechanic
,
Big Time Zookeeper
,
Big Time—
"

"That's a whole genre," I said, "not one game. And
Outsourced Tech Support
is a parody."

"It looks like one game," said Her. "Why are so many people writing the same game?"

"Because
Frosting Frenzy
made a billion dollars for Fucknovis Studios, or whatever they're called now. That's in like 2011. And uh-oh, now it's 2012 and they need a follow-up. They'd love to make the exact same game again, but it's not like with
Brilhantes
where you sell to different people. Everyone who'd buy
Frosting Frenzy
again has already signed up as a Fucknovis beta tester. So they do
Fondant Fury
.

"And a sequel is actually harder to make, because you used up all the easy ideas the first time. So then they try to mix it up a little with the
Big Time
series. Meanwhile, every other casual developer is ripping off
Frosting Frenzy
and saturating the market. It's not a business you want to be in."

"Let's talk MMORPGs," said Her. "I've seen a number of press reports—"

"No," I said, "this is stupid. I thought talking to you would be interesting, but it's like explaining my job to my mother. Assuming my mother was a swarm of trilobites."

"She does go on," whispered one of Them. I suddenly noticed that Curic had left. Left me alone with Them and with Her.

"I'm sorry, I thought you'd enjoy this," said Her. "Most people enjoy conversations about things they know about. Maybe you want to drive the conversation. Shall we talk about the Inostrantsi?"

I flinched under the blanket of Them. "Yes, you're curious," said Her. "You wrote about them on the twenty-third of August. I was there when it happened, Ariel. I had members that lived among the Inostrantsi, members that died in the collapse. Maybe you want to know how it happened. Maybe you think the Constellation could have prevented it. Maybe you want to accuse me of something."

"You do seem a little defensive."

"I don't like it when societies collapse!" said Her. "It's a lot of death and a lot of work. Have you played the computerized interactive works of the late, great Inostrantsi civilizations?"

"No, I have not," I said. "Are we back to games again?"

"There were some inspired pieces of art," said Her. "Not just the games. The literature and what you would call music. Their touches and echoes still haunt me."

"Curic dropped me the MassMonger 31," I said. "I couldn't get it set up. I guess you'd know that, since you're the only person who reads my blog."

"The MassMonger was a primitive computer used in ritual," said Her. "I'm talking about the state of the art, just before the collapse. Wearable networked computers of great subtlety. Some of my members were quite fond of the experiences." The trilobites all sighed.

"The Inostrantsi had beautiful games, driven by artificial intelligence that changed the gameplay procedurally, a little at a time. Always providing new experiences. But always the same game. A certain kind of person goes into the simulation space and doesn't come out. They're happy with the same stimulus, over and over again. My own members went in and didn't come out! That's you!" The trilobites squeaked, chastised by the collective intelligence that they formed.