Constellation Games (28 page)

It's a crowded situation here at
chez
Blum College Station, as my parents are renting out to a boarder (an A&M student) in my brother Raph's old room. Obviously the way to handle my and Tetsuo's visit on top of that is to have
me
sleep in the living room, and give my old bed to the seven-foot-six space alien, not counting the tail.

Tetsuo and I pulled his steamer trunk into my bedroom, panting. "I've been living on a couch all month," I said. "So if you wouldn't mind doing your actual sleeping in the living room...I mean, there's no way you'll fit in this bed."

"I will sleep on an inflatable pillow-mattress of my own design," said Tetsuo.

"Okay, great, but by parental decree, your stuff goes in here. I always just use the closet."

"You once lived in this room?" Tetsuo had worn his "status hat" (a cowboy hat) on the train ride up to College Station, and he had never taken it off. Now the ceiling fan brushed it off and he caught it.

"Yeah, in high school. Hey, you should scan this room, like Curic did my old house."

"We can't scan every place you've lived, just in case there's an additional fire."

"No, I mean, this room is exactly the way it was when I left for college. It's a historical recreation. It hasn't changed since 2004. I didn't know Jenny, or Bai, or anyone."

Tetsuo looked around and pointed at a plug-in air freshener near the window. "This appliance says copyright 2013," he said.

"Well, it hasn't changed very much. But when my folks find another boarder, all this stuff gets boxed up and put in the attic. This is your last chance."

"I'd rather interview the former inhabitant," said Tetsuo. He opened my desk drawer and gently lifted out a red plastic protractor.

I opened the closet that used to contain my dress shirts. It was now full of boxes marked RAPHAEL BDRM. I jumped over Tetsuo's trunk and started dragging it towards the other closet. Tetsuo said nothing.

"Former inhabitant?" I said. "That would be me."

"Hrm-hrm. Perhaps you want to tell me about the Greek emotion called nostalgia." Tetsuo held the protractor by one end and waved it up and down. The cheap plastic wobbled.

I thought about going back in time and telling my younger self that in ten years a space alien would be in my room waving my protractor around. Except I didn't remember the protractor at all.

"There's no nostalgia here," I said. "Nostalgia's in the rec room with the TV and the game systems. This is where I got sent when I wasn't allowed to play anymore."

"Nostalgia is only for good memories?" I don't think Tetsuo was being sarcastic.

I strained against paint that had turned into glue and yanked open the other closet door. "Oh, geez," I said. Half-hidden behind an old computer monitor was my secret pinup of PS2-era Dana Light, her polygonal tits looming out of a camouflage halter top as she blew smoke out of her pistol.

"I am going to die," I said. "I can't believe that's been hanging in here the whole time!" I reached to pull the poster down.

"Don't touch anything!" said Tetsuo. "This room is historical!"

"You guys already scanned my notebooks," I said. "Leave me some dignity!"

"So obviously Raph has to be Raphael," I said.

"Why is it obvious?" said Tetsuo. He laid on an ottoman and lifted his head above the dinner table to look us in the eyes.

"Well, the name's the same," I said.

"Your brother's not a turtle," said Tetsuo. "Why split a hair over the turtle's name?"

"Humans like these coincidences," said my father.

"It comes from
Paradise Lost
," said my mother. "Our little expository angel."

Tetsuo put an entire taco into his mouth and made a sound like a garbage disposal, then noisily sucked taco puree off the inside of his mouth.

"
Any
way," I said. "Despite my diminutive size, my weapon of choice is the broom, and usually Raph uses a ping-pong paddle, but it's around Hanukkah time and Raph has the brilliant idea to use our menorah as his sai. Uh, the candelabra."

"I don't know any of those words," said Tetsuo.

My mother pushed her chair back. "I'll get it out of storage."

"No!" I said. "It's a ritual candle holder that holds one candle for every night of Hanukkah, and if you're a kid who's not allowed to have toy swords, it looks kind of like the sword used by Raphael the Ninja Turtle. That's it. We do not have to fetch the object in question."

"It is explained," said Tetsuo. "Were the candles lit?" Clearly visualizing a story that ended with the house burning down, since I'm so good at that.

"No, it's just after school. He takes the candles out, we're gonna put them back later because we're criminal masterminds. So it's 'hyah hyah hyah cowabunga!' for a few minutes, and then Raph loses his grip on the menorah. Flies out of his hand and smacks the wall.

"Makes a big gouge in the plaster, right over there. And one of the menorah's candle holders is bent so badly that it snaps off when we try to bend it back."

"Oh no!" said Tetsuo. "It has ritual significance!"

I looked up from my plate, taco shell crumbling around my fingers, at the space alien sitting in Raph's place. Nothing else in this dining room had changed in fifteen years. Wooden buffet, dusty silver fruit bowl, framed posters for art exhibitions and Shakespeare festivals. I could still make out the discolored spot on the wall, right below the light switch.

"Right," I said, "so we decide the only way to save our skins is to fix everything so Mom and Dad don't notice. We fix the plaster with, uh, mint-flavored chewing gum, and we fix the candle holder with tape. It's a completely flawless fix, except that when my dad comes home, the vibration from him shutting the front door actually makes the candle holder fall off again. And he sees what we've done and says, 'You little shits—'"

My dad chuckled. "I think we got a little unreliable narrator problem here," he said.

"If Raph were here he'd tell it the same way," I said.

"He's coming for Thanksgiving," said my mother, with a strong hint:
And you, big shot?

"'You little shits!'" I continued, "'Look what you've done, you've ruptured the space-time continuum! Now Hanukkah only has seven nights!' You destroyed the last night!"

"Ha!" said Tetsuo, enunciating clearly because everyone else was laughing. "Ha! Was he joking?"

"Of course," said my father.

"No," said my mother.

"There's a parental twilight world," I said, "where joke shades into punishment. And that's why Hanukkah only lasts a week in our family."

"What about you, Tetsuo?" said my mother. "Tell us about your family."

"My family are gone," said Tetsuo.

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"I did not mean to imply they're dead," said Tetsuo. A contact mission is a trip where you don't return. I'm gone from
them
. I'll never see them again."

"Nobody came with you?" said my mother.

"They all said I was crazy," said Tetsuo. "There's a stereotype that you go on a contact mission and there's no interesting life, only fossils. They called me the fossil hunter."

"Can't you scout out the area first?" said my father. "There must be a better way."

"That's not a contact mission," said Tetsuo. "That's an invasion. If we knew timeahead that your planet contained Ip Shkoy-level civilizations? Ten billion people would follow me through that port. Your cultures would not last seven days. It would be worse than Beatlemania.

"Believe me, human friends. Your planet is protected by an ocean of probable boredom. I took the risk and I am regretless. Now I can live a life I chose, instead of one based on pleasing my ancestors."

My parents were laughing. "I assure you, I am truthful," said Tetsuo.

"Did Ariel set you up for this?" asked my father.

"Oh no! Is it a practical joke?"

"I get it," I said. "And no, I did not 'set him up'."

Tetsuo shivered. "Have I violated a more?"

"Ariel thinks our parenting style is overbearing," said my father.

"Dad," I said, "I'm sitting right here. Like, directly to your left."

"So, when you told us about your own overbearing parents, it seemed—"

"—a bit sitcom-esque," said my mother.

"Mmm," said Tetsuo, "you mean the same again and again. No, I would not call my parents 'overbearing,' even if I knew what that word means. They acted from an attitude of care. They thought I was too frail to spend my life exhuming fossils. I am no Charlie Atlas."

My parents laughed again. "Hey, hold on," I said. "Did
you
set Tetsuo up?"

Tetsuo filled a taco shell entirely with chopped tomatoes. "I proved them wrong!" he said. "I helped build a space station! And I'm quite glad to be talking with you instead of classifying you as fossils."

"The feeling is mutual," said my father.

"And one day the people I left behind will know that I did here. That I made a good decision."

"Do Aliens live that long?" I said, thinking of twenty-thousand-year contact missions.

"Not as Aliens," said Tetsuo. "But yes as Slow People."

I set down my taco shell with a thud that rattled the silverware. "Okay, you gotta explain that."

"Oh," said Tetsuo. "Often dying people have their nervous systems uploaded. My family plans to do that and wait to hear about me."

"Life after death," said my father. "That's amazing."

"Please don't think such thoughts," said Tetsuo. "It's not as good as you believe. I tried to convince them not to do it."

"If I could still talk to my parents—"

"They would forget you, sir," said Tetsuo. "You are too slow. My parents will live through millions of subjective years, they will forget that they were Aliens who had a son who left them. Once our light cones again intersect, what I did here won't matter to them. Slow People always forget. They have their own problems. Whatever you tell them erodes away like rock into sand."

"Did they know this going in?"

"They know it," said Tetsuo. "When they upload, they'll create a backup. It's their backup that will learn what happened to me."

I was coding in the rec room while copying a lifetime of accumulated data from my mother's desktop onto her new smart paper computer. Mom herself was with Tetsuo in the living room, translating some kind of Pey Shkoy poetry into English on non-smart paper. Dad was in the study grading student papers, some of which were probably smart and others stupid or plagiarized. And I was typing on my own smart paper when
Your Quiescent Achievement
went crazy.

Your Quiescent Achievement
is the ancient Gaijin version of video chat and if you have smart paper it comes preinstalled. Which means, folks, it's time once again for
Ariel's Tech Corner
.

You probably assume the smart paper phone you got from a friend-of-a-friend is running the same Unix derivative you have on your human-made phone. Assuming you think about it at all. But you're actually running
The Big Map That's Easy To Understand
, a mesh computing system designed by the Gaijin two hundred million years ago and powerful enough to
emulate
your phone without breaking a sweat. If you've got a big sheet of smart paper, it can emulate your mom's 2010 desktop computer. Or if you've got a
really
big sheet and you fold it up right and put it in a very sunny place, it can emulate your whole data center.

This is a big part of why you don't hate the Constellation anymore. General Electric and World Corporation took one look at this technology and told their media divisions to shut up about Antarctica, and start talking up the Greenland negotiations and doing soft-focus profiles of the Hierarchy Interface overlay. Smart paper is only about twenty years ahead of what we can make today, but twenty years in the tech industry is a hell of a long time. And if humans had developed this tech on our own, people like Bai sure wouldn't be making it in their ovens using nanotech molds. (I don't think GE and Worldcorp anticipated that part.)

Anyway, your phone is now just a software application running on an operating system from the time of the dinosaurs. Drop into the underlying OS and you can use
apps
from the time of the dinosaurs: games, productivity and incomprehensible Gaijin garbage. Plus
Your Quiescent Achievement
, which is all three at once.

Jenny and I tested YQA from different rooms of her apartment a few days ago, and it didn't seem any better than regular human video chat. Actually it's worse; the video maxes out at fifteen frames a second, the view is blue-shifted from the infrared, and the program's been (automatically) translated into English but not localized. Jenny was angry that it didn't recognize "female" as a gender.

But now that you can use smart paper to communicate with people in Ring City, YQA is rapidly becoming a killer app. Specifically, it's killing the government's ability to control our communications with the Constellation. Not bad for a collection of annoying minigames that's older than mammals.

Howdy!

Someone named Curic wants to build a relationship between you! You ask why is he interested in you? I can't tell you exactly; it would spoil the fun! But it's one of these four possibilities:

• Crew of water vessel
  
• Mealtime companion
  
• Realizer
  
• Co-parent of an existing child
  

Are you interested?

Good question. Half of Curic had gotten me into big trouble with the BEA by bringing me up to Ring City to talk to the Her superorganism. The other half had sat back and let it happen, despite totally disagreeing with her crossself's goals. Now she'd come to Earth and was harrassing me over the Internet? And why couldn't she use a normal chat program? With some trepidation, I flipped a virtual switch to the "Interested" position.

Yee-haw! I know I'm just a piece of software, but I know some tricks to help people build good relationships. You'll be hearing from me again!

Yeah, I bet. A blue-shifted low-angle infrared shot of Curic bloomed onto the paper. This wasn't a video, even one with a low frame rate. It was a
photograph
, updated once a second, like the Brain Embryo game
Enjoyable Craft
, which I never reviewed on my blog because it had very impressive 3D effects and just about nothing else.

"Ariel, hello," said the Curic-shaped blob. "Is this working for you?"

"Who goes there?" I said.

"It's Curic," said Curic.

"
Which
Curic? Save the Humans Curic, or Plan C Curic?"

"Save the Humans," said Curic.

"Good. Wait, no, it could be a trap. You have to tell me something that Plan C Curic wouldn't know."

"That's somewhat impossible," said Curic, "since the two of us share a brain. Let me say, rather, that we're both very grateful you convinced Mr. Krakowski you still had the port."

"Yeah, thanks for that," I said. "Your crossself got me into huge trouble. They revoked my Constellation Library card. I couldn't even send you paper notes after the Her incident. They... they tore my fucking house down, Curic. I had to stand there saying 'talk to Curic, talk to Curic' while they took everything I owned. Why didn't you do anything?"

A dark red supernova took over the middle of the screen—Curic's antennacles had flared or something. "What you did was necessary. Because of your actions, Ariel, Save the Humans and Plan C have been reconciled. There's no more ambivalence. My crossself and I are once again in perfect harmony."

"Reconciled how?"

"Plan C has sent a port back to Constellation space, but it won't arrive for seventy Earth years. That gives us, Save the Humans, time to accustom you to more efficient social arrangements. If we do a good job, Plan C will collapse our end of the port so that nothing can get through. We can continue a normal contact mission and avoid the massive disruption of your society. And if Save the Humans fails, at least we'll avoid the Inostrantsi scenario. We won't have to evacuate your planet and reboot your civilization."

"Your crossself sold you out," I said. "You're going to fail. You can't convert humanity to fluid overlay anarchism in seventy years. It took six thousand years with the Aliens."

"We don't have to
convert
you. We just have to pull you back from the fossilization line. And thanks to the actions of my crossself's overlay,
my
overlay now has a chance in hell. You Saved the effing Humans, Ariel. You can tell yourself that whenever someone ruins your day by calling you a nasty name or taking all your private property. You hug your teddy bear and you tell yourself you're a big hero, and if things get bad enough, you can start thinking about our deal."

"
What
did I
do
? They must know by now that I didn't have the port. So what was the point? How did Plan C Curic take it back?"

"You were the fall guy. You were the distraction. More than that I can't tell you. The secret has a half-life of three years."

"It's not even your secret. It's your crossself's.
You
can tell me."

"If I tell my crossself's secrets, then he won't trust me anymore. Then I'll stop trusting
him
. And then you'll see firsthand why ambivalence used to be considered a mental illness."

"Can I see you in person? Are you on Earth?"

"No," said Curic. "I have many important things to do out here. I was going to visit the Philippines, but my visa was denied. What a waste of time. I've just about had it with your nation-states."

"How are you on the Internet?" I said. "Far as I know, it's still blocked."

"Yes," said Curic, "subversive elements in your nation-state were making it difficult for our satellites to use your communication networks."

"Subversive elements like the government and the ISPs?"

I can't recognize your trunk! Are you facing away from the display?

"It was very annoying," said Curic. "Long story short, we had to build our own network."

"You built another
Internet
?"

"Oh, I don't think it has much in common with the Internet," said Curic. "It's a system the Gaijin invented two hundred million years ago."

"Are you nuts?" I said, momentarily forgetting that that was recently an open question. "Didn't you learn anything from Antarctica? You can't—"

"We learned that humans really hate having things taken away from them," said Curic. That's right, no two-second round-trip lunar communications delay; she
interrupted
me. "Even things that nobody owns and that are eventually going to flood their coastal cities."

"Okay, there's no need to be all bitter."

"I don't remember learning that humans hate having things given to them for free."

"The government will hate it," I said. "That's why they're blocking your Internet access in their first place. They want to control the contact."

"If they want to block us," said Curic, "they will have to take your smart paper away."

"What is it, some peer-to-peer thing?" I looked at the smart paper; not the jumpy picture of Curic on the paper but the thing itself. "They'll take it away," I said.

"Humans hate having things taken away," repeated Curic.

"Oh, you're being clever? I have to live on this planet. I don't have the luxury of sitting back in lunar orbit and running experiments to point out the natives' hypocrisy."

Curic disappeared from the screen. I thought she'd hung up, but
Your Quiescent Achievement
had decided the time was right to poke its grasper-tentacle into the conversation.

It sounds like things are going well between you and Curic! Here's a little puzzle to help test your compatibility.

"Are you seeing a map here?" I said.

"I am," said Curic. The map depicted a desolate, Mars-like landscape, except Mars doesn't have lakes.

Say, fella, what a view! This game is called "Three Neighbors," but you can play it with just the two of you. It's simple—just pick your favorite spot. But don't get too greedy for that lakeside property! If your spot overlaps Curic's, both of you lose!

"Why does it think things are going well? We're yelling at each other like idiots."

"It's
because
we're yelling."

"I don't understand."

"Spend some time with Gaijin and you'll understand," said Curic.

I squeezed a point on the map and a little geodesic dome sprouted up. Curic's dome flashed onto the paper immediately, all the way across the map from mine.

"Look," I said, "I don't want to be mad at my first contact. I'm sorry I yelled at you, and I'm sorry that Dana and I jumped to conclusions about ambivalence and thought you were crazy."

"And I'm sorry we built the Outernet," said Curic. "Although the contract we entered into with the nation-state of Greenland clearly gives us that right."

"That's not how you apologize," I said. "I could have put all kinds of disclaimers in my apology!"

"And, had we built it earlier, you could have looked up reliable information about mental health."

"Okay, just... forget it. Forget the whole apologizing thing."

"I will, Ariel."